Yesterday was December 9th. I learned something strange that day. They told me that some of the “poisons” used to kill weeds are not poisons at all. They are hormones designed not to destroy the plant, but to force it to grow too fast. When I heard that sentence, my mind froze. So the way to kill a plant is not to weaken it, but to push it into growth it cannot handle. When a weed absorbs this hormone, it enters a state of uncontrolled expansion. It swells, strains, and eventually collapses because its structure cannot bear the speed. What kills the plant is not its inability to grow, but being made to grow too much. This idea unsettled me. The fact that what we call poison is used not to kill, but to “overgrow”… it felt strange, inverted, and strangely illuminating. For a moment, I turned inward: Aren’t there things that kill humans the same way? Aren’t we sometimes forced to grow faster than we can carry? Society’s expectations, the pressure to succeed, the demand to improve ourselves endlessly, the race to be better every single day… Sometimes a person collapses not from lack, but from excess. When a person's inner world is pushed to grow faster than it can sustain, don’t they share the same fate as that plant? That was when I realized: Not every kind of growth is life. Some forms of growth wear the disguise of a slow death. And perhaps what poisons human development is not the inability to grow, but the demand to grow too much. December 9 made me understand something: Not everything that looks strong is healthy. Some things die by growing. Some people too. When I got home in the evening, I opened my history notebook. On the page for December 9, it said: “December 9, 1979 – The World Health Organization declared smallpox officially eradicated.” When I read that sentence, I immediately thought back to what I had learned earlier that day about the weed killer that destroys by forcing growth. How excessive expansion, uncontrolled development, can bring a living thing to its end. Smallpox was an enemy of the same kind. It did not move slowly or spread evenly. It multiplied uncontrollably, from body to body, from city to city, filling the world at a speed the world could not bear. The deadliness of a virus often lies not in its strength but in how fast it spreads. Just like that growth hormone that kills a plant… too much expansion, too much growth, destroys both a weed and humanity. The eradication of smallpox may have been one of the quietest, yet greatest victories in human history. Because for the first time, humanity was not racing against its own speed, but against the speed of a virus and won. Behind that victory were thousands of scientists, doctors, workers, all focused on one essential question: A growth that cannot be stopped can only be defeated by stopping it. What was eradicated in 1979 was a disease, but also a principle: Not everything that grows is good. Some things must have their development halted so that life can continue. The eradication of smallpox made me realize this: Humans, too, sometimes battle their own acceleration. When a person cannot slow their growth, they collapse under the weight of what they are becoming. Sometimes a downfall is not born from lack, but from excess. And sometimes the greatest healing does not begin by growing more, but by learning to stop. At the end of December 9, I wrote in my notebook: “Some things are destroyed by growing. Others are saved by stopping the growth.”