The Way Books Grow With Us

There are certain books you don’t really reread so much as re-encounter.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of those.

I first met it as a teenager in the spring of 1996, when it was required reading for a high school honors English entrance exam. At the time, it felt like a story about finding your sense of self—about being different, pushing against expectations, and figuring out who you are when the world seems perfectly content with you being someone else. That reading made sense then. It was probably the only reading it could have been.

I really didn’t think much about the book until ten years ago when I came across a metal lunchbox in the cafeteria of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.  It struck me as odd that a student decades earlier might have carried this with them in a way a student at the time would have the Avengers on a backpack today. But this month I went back to the book for the first time in years, and what struck me was how little the text had changed and how much I had.

That’s when it hit me: some books don’t just age well. They scale.

When we’re young, Jonathan Livingston Seagull feels like a story about identity. About refusing to live at the level of the flock. About choosing something deeper than approval or comfort. For adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, that message lands exactly where it should. Teenagers are already asking the big questions—Who am I? Why don’t I fit neatly? What happens if I take myself seriously? The book doesn’t introduce those questions; it simply gives them language.

But reading it later in life, the gravitational pull of the story shifts. The rebellion fades into the background, and something quieter but heavier moves to the foreground: the pursuit of mastery.

Jonathan isn’t chasing difference for its own sake. He’s chasing excellence. Discipline. Precision. Understanding. And the book becomes less about standing apart from the flock and more about what it costs to move beyond your current level of competence.

That’s a very different story once you’ve lived a little.

Because by then, you know that mastery is rarely glamorous. It’s often lonely. It requires giving up identities that once served you well. It demands humility at exactly the moment when you might feel entitled to confidence. And perhaps most unsettling of all, each new level of growth reveals how incomplete the last one was.

That part doesn’t register when you’re fourteen.

As a teenager, the ending feels aspirational. As an adult, it feels honest.

What stood out to me on this reread was that Jonathan’s reward for mastery isn’t celebration or certainty—it’s deeper work. More learning. A clearer understanding of how much remains unfinished. Growth doesn’t resolve the story; it complicates it.

And that’s where the book quietly becomes about lived experience.

Most of us have felt this progression in our own lives. Early on, growth feels additive—skills on top of skills, achievements stacked neatly together. But eventually you realize that moving to the next stage isn’t about adding more; it’s about letting go. Letting go of ways of thinking, habits, or even versions of yourself that were necessary once, but now hold you back.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull captures that transition in a deceptively simple fable. The language is straightforward. The symbolism is obvious. But the emotional truth deepens as the reader deepens.

That’s why it worked as an honors entrance exam text, whether the adults assigning it articulated this or not. Not because every student was expected to grasp the full philosophical weight of the story, but because the book reveals how a reader thinks. How far they’re willing to go. How they deal with ambiguity. Whether they can sit with a text that doesn’t hand them a single right answer.

And maybe more importantly, it plants a seed.

The best texts don’t demand full understanding on first contact. They wait. They allow you to outgrow one interpretation and grow into another. Years later, when you come back carrying more responsibility, more loss, more perspective, the same words point to entirely different truths.

That’s what happened to me.

What once felt like a story about standing out now feels like a meditation on commitment. On patience. On the quiet, often unseen work of becoming better at something that matters to you—even when no one is clapping.

So maybe the real gift of a book like Jonathan Livingston Seagull isn’t that it teaches a lesson. It’s that it keeps changing the question.

Early on, it asks: Who are you?

Later, it asks: How far are you willing to go?

And eventually, it asks something harder and more enduring: What are you willing to leave behind in order to grow?

That’s not a bad question for a teenager.

But it’s an especially powerful one for an adult who’s already learned that moving to the next stage of life almost always costs more than we expect and gives us something deeper in return.