Among the many privileges of attending my high school, what seems to be the most popular is complaining about attending my high school. Now I am assured this is not the product of anything specific about my school in particular, but rather something equally specific about teenagers, what with our apathy, eyerolls, and text slang or whatever.

One of the more common complaints about our campus is how crowded the hallways are, and it’s valid. One feels far more like a raindrop in a thundercloud than a person when going from class to class, which can be very uncomfortable. Sometimes the flow stops for seemingly no reason, and we all just wait until it starts back up again. It reminds me of a lot of waiting in line at Disney world. Except instead of Splash Mountain, you end up in algebra. Which is far less fun than an amusement ride and yet at times equally nauseating.

But anyways, I am of the strong opinion that if something seems inherently dislikeable (much like walking the halls in my school), you aren’t paying enough attention to it. And so for the past couple of weeks, I didn’t listen to music on my way to class, rarely had in-hallway conversations, and just tried to pay attention.

The first thing you’ll notice about walking to class is how loud it is, there are a lot of people talking to one and other, trying to be heard over all the other people trying to be heard, and so the voices mix together in a kind of symphony of conversation. A bunch of understandable sounds adding up to create unintelligible white noise. You can’t really listen in on any one of the conversations people are having, but you can be sure that they are having them, just in a circumstance your ears can’t decipher, and for some weird reason that makes me happy.

But more than that I enjoy looking around at people, not at any one person in particular, just from one to the other. Granted sometimes I make awkward eye contact with a person, but I just smile and nod to them, and they usually smile and nod back, that makes me happy too.

More than the noise, or the nods and smiles, I find the most wonderful part of walking to class to be realizing that the people I look at on my way there are all real. Too often I kind of subconsciously think of the people in the hallways as one might think of places they’ve never been too. For example I’ve never been to Paris, but I know it’s there, I just haven’t seen it, much in the same way I know the people in this hall are more than just their clothes or voice or walk or attitude but in the case for the vast majority of them, I don’t actually know that, I just assume it to be true, in the same way I assume Paris to be real even if I’ve never seen it, the same way I assume the conversations in the hall are happening even though I don’t truly hear them. The same way I know my heart must be beating, even if I can't feel it.

Sadly, It is not possible to go to every location on earth to assure myself that each and every place exists and is just as real as my high school, I cannot meet every person in this hallway and learn each of the miracles and tragedies that have woven in the fabric of their existence to make that person. I cannot learn the complexities of their minds or their hearts, and so I am resigned to learning the inner workings of my own. But in a way, that’s enough. I can look around me at this small Florida suburb and realize that all other places on earth are just real as the ground beneath my feet. All other people as real and complex and pained and worried, and happy, and sad, and confused as I am. That their heads are filled with thoughts just as complicated, their hearts filled with feelings just as deep. All of us real, for better or for worse. And that makes me happy enough to stop complaining about the halls, at least for a little bit.