Growing Over the Wall
What a bougainvillea taught me about the kind of person worth becoming
I have a morning walk routine that’s slowly turned into an obsession.
I live on a campus that’s genuinely nice. Good walkways, trees in the right places, everything orderly and clean.
But after a while, “orderly and clean” starts feeling like a hotel lobby.
Comfortable, yes. But not quite alive.
So I started walking out. Into the village nearby. Past local homes, chai stalls, streets that nobody has tidied up for anyone.
That’s where things get interesting.
The campus is curated. The village just is.
And there’s something about that messy, unplanned quality that wakes you up in a way that clean walkways simply don’t.
On one of those walks, a house stopped me.
The entrance was covered in bright magenta bougainvillea. The kind that looks almost too vivid to be real. My first thought was, whoever lives here has great taste.
Then I looked more carefully.
The flowers weren’t from that house at all. They were growing from the neighbour’s side. The plant had just quietly grown outward, leaned over the wall, and spread itself across the entrance next door. The house looked beautiful because of someone else’s plant. And the plant’s actual owner probably had no idea any of this was happening.
I stood there longer than a grown adult probably should, staring at a plant.
But something about it stayed with me. That house looked beautiful entirely because of someone else’s presence.
The plant didn’t plan it. Didn’t ask permission.
It just grew the way it grows, and beauty landed on the neighbour’s doorstep.
Now I want to tell you a bit about my mother and my wife. I’ll keep it short, I promise.
My mother’s love language is food.
But saying it like that really doesn’t do it justice.
When someone’s coming home, a guest, a family member, anyone, she starts early morning. What follows is less like cooking and more like the planning of a military operation, except warmer and with much better food.
She thinks through the whole experience.
What will they have the moment they walk in? What comes after that? What does it get served in? How does the whole thing end?
She has a level of attention to detail that would make a professional chef nervous.
What gets me is that this never changes based on who’s visiting. Same obsession for an important guest as for just me or my wife or my daughter on a regular weekday evening. “It’s just family” is not a category that exists for her. And the food never runs out, not because she miscalculates, but because running out is not something she would ever allow.
My wife is different, but the instinct comes from a similar place.
A few days ago she went to a store on a Saturday morning to pick up eggs. Routine errand. While the man at the counter was putting her order together, she noticed he looked a little anxious. A little stretched. Early morning, busy day, hadn’t had a moment to himself.
She asked, “Did you have your breakfast?”
He said not really. Too busy.
She said, “Would you like me to get you something? A juice or a small snack from nearby?”
He said no, but the way he said it, genuinely touched, a little surprised told the whole story.
He mentioned that nobody usually asks something like that.
That just being asked made the whole interaction feel different. More human.
She does this with delivery people at the door. With anyone who’s clearly having a long day. It’s not something she puts on. It’s just how she moves through the world , always quietly noticing, always asking herself what does this person need right now?
Neither of them think they’re doing anything special. My mother would say she just likes cooking. My wife would say she just asked a question.
Which is exactly what the bougainvillea would say, if plants could talk.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what we’re building for ourselves.
Careers, goals, habits, the life we’re working toward.
That’s all fine.
But there’s a quieter question hiding underneath all of it: What happens to the people around you just because you’re there?
Not what you’ve achieved. Not your plans.
Just when you show up, does anything get better?
Does anyone feel a little more seen?
Does the room change, even slightly?
Most of us honestly don’t know. We’re in our own heads, dealing with our own things. But the people who do change the air in a room they’re almost never thinking about it. They’re not trying to be the bougainvillea.
They’ve just grown that way.
The photo above is from that morning. A beautiful entrance that belongs to someone who did nothing to earn it. A plant that crossed a wall with no agenda and made the whole street more worth walking down.
It leaves me with one question I want to keep carrying.
Am I growing in a way that makes things more beautiful for the people standing next to me?
The flowers didn’t try. They just grew toward the light, and something beautiful happened on the other side of the wall.
That seems like a good way to live.
That’s it for this week
Manoj
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