My daughter and I climbed the hill behind our neighborhood. Call it a “back hill” and you picture some gentle bump, but this one rises to nearly 500 meters above sea level. Even for an adult it takes a solid hour to reach the top. For a five-year-old girl, that is no small journey. Like many trails, it begins gently enough, but past the halfway point the slope suddenly steepens. I honestly never expected we would make it all the way to the summit. The reason I suggested the hike in the first place was much simpler: I imagined we would walk part of the way up, sit on a bench, cool our throats with ice water, look back at how far we had come, and enjoy a modest little sense of achievement. She accepted immediately. Lately she has been in a sort of stamp-rally phase, excited to try anything she has never done before. The older I get, the flatter life can feel precisely because more and more of it is familiar, so I envied that freshness in her.
For a child who has always lived in the city, the forest and the mountain were new just by being there. If I exaggerate a little, every few steps she stopped to marvel at something she had never really noticed before. She picked up an acorn on the trail and asked what it was, then decided she wanted to see the inside and smashed it against a rock in her tiny fist without mercy. When I told her acorns were “sort of like squirrel food,” she lit up and began talking about a squirrel story she had probably heard in kindergarten.
A few steps later she spotted a fallen tree, ran over with quick little steps, and tried hard to snap off a branch. When she realized she couldn’t do it alone, she gave me a wordless look asking for help. I broke off a branch and handed it to her. She tried walking with it like a hiking stick, copying the grown-ups. But it was too thin to be a proper walking stick, so she quickly abandoned that idea and started swinging it at me instead, whoosh whoosh. I played the villain as usual, yelling “Aagh!” and collapsing in fake death, but that wasn’t what she wanted. We had to sword-fight together with our sticks. I had to match her rhythm five or six times before we could finally start moving again.
But we had barely gone a few more steps when a line of ants stole her attention. One moment she would say, “They’re so cute,” and the next moment she wanted to step on them very, very lightly. Whatever that mixture of feelings is, children seem to have it in abundance.
Because she kept discovering new things at every turn, the hike itself barely progressed. I had to keep pulling her attention back, saying, “Come on, let’s go now.” I tried hurrying her with “We still have a long way to go,” and coaxing her with “Let’s just reach that point and rest a little.” Then, without really thinking, I made a mistake. I said, “There’s a guy at the top who sells drinks and ice cream.”
It wasn’t a lie. On weekends there really was a man who carried a cooler up to the summit and sold cold drinks and ice cream there. But I had never actually intended to go all the way up, so it was an honest mistake. From that moment on, though, her goal became perfectly clear: reach the summit and eat sweet ice cream.
Ice cream, something she could buy at any time from the convenience store around the corner, somehow ignited her. It is true that she has no money of her own and can’t buy it whenever she wants. But she also knows from experience that one “Daddy, can I have ice cream?” is often enough to land a cool popsicle. Looking for the shortest path to a reward is adult logic. A child, when the prize feels worthwhile, simply runs toward it.
Drunk on the dream of summit ice cream, she finally committed herself to the climb. Even on the steep stretches she gripped my hand tight and muttered “I can do it, I can do it,” gathering strength into her legs and pushing forward. “I can do it” was something I had taught her not long before, calling it a “magic spell” for difficult moments, and now she was using it on the mountain.
That, in turn, stirred a different kind of worry in me. Slip of the tongue or not, I had dangled ice cream as bait and ended up setting her a summit ascent, a goal that would be demanding even for an adult. I began to worry: what if the vendor happened to stay home that day? I pictured the summit empty, and the disappointment waiting there for a tiny hiker who had spent the whole climb chanting “I can do it.” The thought made me strangely anxious.
To avoid the worst-case scenario, I tried to back out. I told her the path to the top was too long and too rough, and that we could turn back from here because she had already done an amazing job. She stayed firmly in “I can do it” mode. I even offered convenience-store ice cream on the way home instead. She wouldn’t budge. For a brief second I wondered whether she had already learned that a reward earned by seeing something through feels better than a consolation prize for giving up, but that was probably just a doting father overthinking it. Most likely she had simply decided not to accept Dad’s revised terms.
At some point the steep slope left me short of breath as well, and our breaks grew more frequent. I wondered whether this might simply be too difficult for a child not yet seven years old. Yet once the higher ground came into sight, turning back also began to feel awkward.
In the end, she made it to the summit. She had to stop several times on the steep sections to catch her breath, but every hiker we met marveled at her and cheered her on, and she seemed to feed on that encouragement all the way to the gazebo at the top. Thankfully, the ice cream seller really was there. She ran to the cooler, hesitated for a moment over the flavors, chose a Melona, and licked it with pride and accomplishment shining all over her face.
Up to this point, the story sounds like a tidy moral tale: work hard, endure difficulty, achieve your goal. The kind of episode parents like to collect while raising a child. The reason I am still writing about it days later, though, is a lingering doubt, almost a kind of disillusionment. Is it really right to push children toward endurance, to train them to suffer for what they want? There is no doubt that perseverance matters in life. But we often fool ourselves into thinking virtues like that can only come from someone deliberately teaching them in childhood. People can learn those attitudes on their own as they grow, sometimes through failure. Perhaps the healthier direction is to help them avoid a life where the goal always devours the process, where sacrificing today for tomorrow becomes second nature.
The sweetness of a reward after reaching a goal is real, but it is also fleeting. Around us are countless goals not yet reached, and before we have even finished enjoying today’s reward, we are already driving ourselves toward the next one. Compared with that brief flash, the span of striving feels almost endless. It fills most of life. Whether that is right or wrong, it is a sad habit we acquire just by living in this world.
Looking back, if the journey itself was enjoyable, even a small reward became a good memory. If the journey was miserable, even a large reward often left a bad aftertaste. A trip where you race down the expressway only to arrive a little sooner is mostly just tunnel darkness and the boredom of enduring it. Better, I think, to move a little slower, talk with Dad about acorns on the trail, fight with sticks, watch strange insects, and enjoy the walk itself. That is what makes an ordinary day more livable. Maybe that is what I am really supposed to help with.