I spent countless years studying under Princess Celestia, learning countless things, but I’ll always remember this one lesson.

It was late night in the castle, and there was a silence so deafening I couldn’t fall asleep. It was silence that you seldom hear anywhere but at the castle. The lack of hearing the wind pass through the trees. The absence of an old wooden roof, creaking under its own weight. Down in the city you could hear ponies at any time of night, if you listened closely enough. But high upon the side of the mountain in the castle’s marble peaks, there was only the muttering of curtains blowing by an open window.

I climbed out of bed and abandoned trying to sleep. My room was as lavishly decorated as any you’d expect to find in a castle. A silver goblet sat on a tray on my nightstand, still half-filled with cherry juice I hadn’t managed to finish the night before. I took a small sip from it, grimacing at the bitter and stale taste, then I left to wander the castle.

I still remember every little detail of my walk to the Princess’ chamber that night. The halls had been empty, the guards doubtlessly standing watch outside below. I snuck into the mess hall and nabbed a sweet loaf leftover from that night’s dinner, taking it with me as I wandered back up to the halls above. When I first moved into the castle I’d been scared to be alone at night, but overtime I grew fond of walking around the great big empty rooms.

I was most fond of the balcony on the top floor, where the Princess’ room was. She sometimes taught lessons out on it, right in view of the city and the hills. I took the spiral staircase leading to the topmost floor of the castle, casually chewing on the sweet loaf as I went. At the top of the stairs, I went right and walked out onto the balcony, only to find the Princess there, waiting for me. She sat on a large, flat pillow, smiling at me with amusement.

I blushed and hid my stolen treat behind my back, even though my chipmunk cheeks and the crumbs around my muzzle were a sure sign of my crime. I wondered if she was waiting up here to scold me.

“Twilight,” she said, her voice gentle. She gestured to the pillow next to hers. “Come, sit and finish your meal.”

I levitated the sweet loaf out from behind my back, sensing that Celestia wasn’t angry with me. Nevertheless, I tried to shift the topic. “Princess!” I greeted. “What are you doing up here at this hour?”

Celestia glanced off the balcony, at the purple rooftops below. “Just thinking, I suppose...” She looked back at me with a small smirk. “And having some of the chef’s wonderful sweet bread,” she said, levitating an absconded loaf of her own.

I stared at her blankly, but then I couldn’t help but giggle at the thought of the Princess having a sweet tooth. I walked over and sat by her side.

“And what are you doing up at this hour, my faithful student?” Celestia asked. My hairs bristled. She had asked me to call her Celestia instead of Princess. I never felt comfortable acting so casually towards her, so I didn’t. In an act of what some might call petty spite—if they didn’t know the Princess or know how kind she was—she began calling me her faithful student whenever I refused to call her Celestia.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I answered.

Celestia smiled. “Me neither,” she said, sitting perfectly still and staring off into the distance. “I wonder why that is.”

I shrugged, looking off the balcony. “Maybe it’s just a restless night. The winds certainly are picking up.”

“Maybe,” Celestia agreed.

I looked at her face, while she gazed out. Staring into her eyes always made me feel small. They held an immeasurable depth to them, an infinite amount of time. I wondered more than once what it must be like to live for over a thousand years. I sometimes think it must be amazing to have lived through history, been a part of the ages. Sometimes, I tried to think about how much those silver-pink eyes have seen, and I'd shudder. But all the same I felt jealous.

“Princess?” I asked, making sure I wasn’t interrupting her silence.

She turned to me with a smile. “Yes, my faithful student?”

“Do you have a birthday?”

She fought a laugh at the question. Were it anyone but her, I might have felt hot behind my ears. I still did, a little. “Where in Equestria did that question come from?”

“I was just thinking about how there isn’t any holiday for it,” I answered, taking a bite out of my sweet loaf.

“The Summer Sun Celebration is more than enough. I fear for the treasury everytime it comes around.” She shifted in her seat and cleared her throat. “But more to the point, even if I had a birthday, I’ve long since forgotten when it was.”

She paused, her ears swiveling to follow the changing direction of the wind. I subconsciously felt myself do the same. “Tell me, what do birthdays celebrate?” she asked.

I pondered for a brief moment. “They’re to celebrate someone’s existence, and them growing a year older.” I hesitated, unable to tell from Celestia’s stare whether she was pleased with my answer. “I think?” I added, weakly.

“Wouldn’t it seem a bit silly, then, to celebrate it for someone who doesn’t grow old?” she asked, her lips settled in a slight smirk.

“Not at all!” I shouted, a little too loudly and a little too quickly. “I think there’s plenty of reason to celebrate you being alive. You’ve improved countless ponies’ lives. You should have a birthday—even if it’s a made up one.”

She raised a chin to her hoof, striking a very contemplative pose. “In that case, I’d like for it to be in June,” she said. “I think it would be fitting to have it on the day of the summer solstice.”

I groaned. “But that’s the Summer Sun Celebration.”

“Well then, I suppose it’s already settled,” she said, the humour in her voice so subtle I nearly didn’t catch it. I often didn’t. When I look back I realize she actually liked to joke quite often. I guess with her peculiar humor and my image of her as a Princess I just didn’t notice it as much.

“What of you, child? What things have you learned recently?” Celestia asked.

“In class today we read about Slate, who used his magic to dig a tunnel through the side of a mountain to help a flooded town evacuate to safety. It took him two weeks to burrow all the way through. It was a magical feat that was completely unheard of at the time, and he was only sixteen at the time when he did it.”

I glanced at Celestia and noticed the look in her eye as she listened. It seemed like it was a story she was well familiar with. “Did you ever meet him?” I asked, hazarding a guess.

She raised her eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, I did,” she answered.

I grew excited that I guessed right. “What was he like?”

“Proud, yet humble. A contradiction I see in many great stallions.”

“Do you think I’ll be as great a unicorn as him by the time I’m his age?” I asked, leaning forward out of my seat.

Celestia put her hoof on my snout and gently pushed me back with a chuckle. “Do you know how Slate managed to dig that tunnel though the mountain and become a hero?” she asked. I shook my head. Celestia tapped me on the nose. “He had patience.”

I wrinkled my snout, resisting an urge to sneeze brought on by the hairs on my nose being tickled. “I don’t understand it though.”

“Hmm?” Celestia raised an eyebrow at me.

“I mean, he was just a farm pony. He had no formal magic training at all. How could somepony like that dig through a mountain all by himself in only a fortnight?”

“How do you think he managed to do it?” Celestia asked, turning the question back to me.

“Um...” I had long since learned that ‘I don’t know’ was never the answer Celestia was looking for. “He had a strong innate talent for magic?”

Celestia shook her head. “He lived in a village of earth ponies. The storm that struck the village was the strongest in a hundred years. Nopony would make the climb over the mountains, let alone the children. He drew on strength to protect those that couldn’t protect themselves, and put his heart and soul into leading them to safety.”

I remained silent. The school had taught us that magic was a very scientific thing, despite what most other ponies thought. Hearing Celestia contradict those teachings came as a surprise.

“How much of the story did they teach you?” Celestia asked.

“Only that he was young, and that he saved the townsponies. Most of the lesson was about how magic blasts can be used to destroy rock, and how to blast the rock so as not to cause a cave in.”

“Then they didn’t tell you that Slate cracked his horn on the tenth day of digging, or that water was stretched thin and they very nearly ran out.”

I flinched. We’d been taught excessively the dangers of overusing magic, and the consequences of a cracked horn. Cracked horns take years to heal. Some never do. It must have been mind-numbingly painful to keep digging.

“How did he manage to keep digging for four whole days?” I asked.

“For the reason I just stated. Water was running out. He had to dig.”

“But they could have gone back to collect rainwater from the storm.”

“The tunnel had collapsed behind them halfway through the mountain,” Celestia said, shooting down my idea. “Stories so rarely tell the truth, that heroes are born from necessity more often than not.”

I nodded dumbly, afraid to speak and appear foolish again.

“They also rarely state the cost. Slate’s heroics took years off his life, and he was never able to use magic again.”

A grimace spread across my lips, though I had figured as much. Casting any magic with a cracked horn has repercussions.

Seeing my expression, Celestia gave me a reassuring smile. “Do not worry, though. The story had a happy ending. While they were in the tunnels his wife fell in love with him, and they were married shortly after. I could tell from seeing them together that he treasured her more than he ever treasured his ability to use magic.”

“Well, that’s still a bit disappointing,” I said, frowning. “Imagine how skilled he could have become if he was given formal teaching.”

Celestia shook her head at me. I felt as though my reply disappointed her somehow. She turned back to the view off the balcony. “Have you managed to make any friends in your class?” she asked.

“No, not really,” I replied, indifferently. I stared down at my pillow and traced small circles on it with my hoof. “Usually they just want to copy my notes, or find out what rumors are true about you or the castle. Or both. Other times they try to pull me away to go do this or that with them, when all I want is to be left alone.”

I thought I saw Celestia frowning out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked she was gently smiling as she had been before. “I guess my tutoring has put you ahead of your peers.”

“Sometimes I just get frustrated by how little they get,” I said, using a frustrated tone that I normally never used in front of the Princess. I needed to vent to her about what it was like. “They don’t pay attention to their work, they talk loudly with their friends in the middle of class, and they wait until the last day before an assignment is due to copy off of somepony else’s notes, and then they act like I’m the bad guy when I don’t let them.”

I noticed Celestia had stopped looking off the balcony and was now staring at me. I took a deep breath and reined myself in. “Sorry,” I said, flattening my ears and looking away sheepishly. “I get a little frustrated by it sometimes.”

“No, no, I completely understand,” Celestia said. My ears perked up with a bit of surprise at her response. “In my audiences I’ve had to deal with every kind of pony you can imagine in. And it’s been that way for the past thousand years.”

I bit my lip, hesitant to ask my next question, but deciding to ask it anyway. “How did you not go crazy?”

Celestia let out a loud and boisterous laugh the likes of which I’d never heard from her. A smile stretched her lips as her laughter died down, reduced to slight chuckling. “I’ve asked myself that several times. Some days I think about other ponies the same way you do.”

“You do?” I asked, surprised. “But you always seemed so patient whenever I attended court.”

Celestia nodded. “They stare at me with blank looks, not really listening to what I say when I tell them ‘no’. They bow, not really caring what it means as much as how they look doing it. And sometimes their complete and utter disregard for what I do each day to keep the kingdom running infuriates me.”

She took a bite of her sweet loaf and went back to staring off the balcony. “It’s completely natural to think like that, but I try not to.”

I studied Celestia in silence. I wanted to speak, to ask why she wastes her time with the petty problems that are all too often brought to her court, but I had no idea how to ask it.

“It’s easy to assume things about ponies based on how they appear to you. It’s the automatic way so many ponies think, to think that you’re the center of the world and your wants and needs should be the rest of the world’s priorities.”

She turned to me, and though at the time I didn’t know enough to understand what she was saying, I knew enough to listen to what she was saying.

“It’s easy to think that way, but you get to decide how you really want to think,” she said, her words carrying a wisdom of age that no other pony knew. “Above all else, that is the one thing I hope to teach you. To teach you that there is an awareness above thought. That you can remain open to multiple interpretations of things. That maybe your classmates selfishly asking you to do their work didn’t come from an educated family, and as such have no one else to turn to. That maybe they spent the extra day given for the assignment taking their dog out to the park, because he’s growing old and won’t be around much longer.”

My eyes darted back and forth between the floor and Celestia’s gaze. “But how can I know whether or not any of that’s true?” I asked.

Celestia slowly shook her head. “You can’t. All I’m saying is that it’s a possibility. It takes effort to think this way. Somedays you might be too tired to think this way. You’ll assume. You’ll take the easy way out.

“But if you are aware of the ponies around you, you’ll start to see their lives, and you’ll start to forgive them. You’ll see the ponies behind the false impressions you’ve created. And once you see them, you’ll want to protect them, too, just as Slate did.”

I chewed my lip, my eyebrows furrowed in thought. “I’m not sure I understand. It doesn’t make sense.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “In what way doesn’t it make sense?”

“Well, it just doesn’t seem realistic,” I replied, blushing as the words came out of my mouth, considering who I was talking to. I stumbled over my words to clarify myself. “I-I mean, it seems like wishful thinking to think about these possibilities that probably aren’t true. I think there’s a great likelihood that ponies could be who your first impression of them is.”

Celestia nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true,” she said, much to my surprise. “It’s very likely that they are who they appear to be.”

I pursed my lips and stared at Celestia. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I couldn’t help but wonder what she was thinking. After a few moments spent staring and not gleaning a thing, I moved on.

I took a bite of my sweet loaf, then, “What if the pony turns out not to just be exactly who you think they are, but someone worse? Ponies can lie. Assuming the best in them and they could lead you right to a pitfall.”

“The idea isn’t to assume these things are true. That would just be replacing one assumption with another.” Celestia smiled, showing she wasn’t disappointed with my response. “I’m glad to see you challenging what I say. It shows you’re thinking critically.”

The loyal student in me rushed to apologize. “I’m sorry, Princess. I don’t mean to sound rude or abrasive. I just don’t really see it working.”

Celestia chuckled, raising a hoof to cover it up. “I didn’t expect you to,” she replied.

She ate the rest of her sweet loaf in silence, then patted my head and stood. “It’s rather late for me,” she said, covering a small yawn. She turned to me and bowed. “Thank you for the wonderful company this evening.”

Dropping my sweet loaf on the pillow, I jumped to my hooves and gave a rigid bow. “I enjoyed our conversation, Princess,” I blurted, hoping she wasn’t leaving because of something I said.

“As did I, my faithful student,” Celestia said, relieving some of the tension in my shoulders.

Then she left. It was just me, the wind, and the night once more.

I lay on my back and stared up into the sky, gazing at the stars. Things were quiet as I ate my sweet bread and thought about what Celestia said. In the meantime, I listed off the constellations I could see in my head, until when I ran out and had to start listing off the stars I recognized and knew by name.

It was the first time I’d spoken so intimately with the Princess. What I didn’t think about at the time, was how Celestia must have felt being more or less alone for those one thousand years Luna spent banished on the moon. In a way, I feel as though it might have been as much of an exile for her as it was for Luna.

I replayed the conversation in my head countless times that night, wondering if I’d been wrong. Every time I looked back on it I found myself agreeing with what I’d said, and wishing to change nothing but the stiff and clumsy way I had spoken.

Once I finished counting stars, I rolled over to my stomach and let out a long and inescapable yawn. Sleepiness, like a rising ocean tide, had flooded in and swept over me. I forced my tired, lazy body to stand so that I could make my way to my chambers. Using my horn to light my path and make sure I didn’t trip, I carefully shambled through the corridors and down the steep spiral stairs leading to my room.

Being relatively young at the time, sleep was important. Though knowing that, I still wish I had forced myself to stay up, forced myself to think a little bit longer about what Celestia had said. If I had, it may not have taken four more years and a trip across Equestria to a backwater town like Ponyville to realize her lesson.

Yet, for obvious reasons, I’m glad I didn’t, and I instead got to meet all my wonderful friends. But the thing about missed opportunities is that you can never really know just what you missed. The curious part of me sometimes wonders how different things may have been if I knew then what I know now.

What I learned once I left the castle was that time has a tendency to repeat itself in the most discreet ways. You wake up, shower, brush your hair, and then eat breakfast. You prepare for the day and go out to your job, at which you have to work hard throughout the day. Once it’s all over, you go home to make yourself dinner, where if you’re lucky you manage to sit down and read a book for maybe an hour or so. Then you go to bed so you can wake up early in order to do it all again. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year.

To me, being an adult is when you realize and accept this reality, the fact that you’re going to repeat these things ad nauseum. And if you assume the things that I did in everypony you meet, then you’re going to be miserable and bored and insufferable your whole life. And that’s your choice. But if you look past those false impressions, you’ll find yourself surrounded by ponies who love, laugh, and care just as you do. The world will be lit up by the common bond you all share and the world will feel a less lonely place for it.

That’s why, in all these years, I remember that night as the most important lesson Celestia taught me. Because that night, she taught me how to think.

What I didn’t understand when I was younger, was that it wasn’t about how accurate or immediate your assumptions about other ponies are. What it was about, was a very small percent. When somepony turns out to be so much more than their first impression tells you, and you would have never known had you dismissed them so casually.

My first day in Ponyville, I met five such ponies. They followed me, bothered me, and at the time, I thought they were just getting in the way of my efforts to stop Nightmare Moon. I dismissed them.

The reason we became best friends, was because they never dismissed me.

That was when I realized what Celestia had been trying to teach me that night. I started to change the way I think about the world. I gained awareness. From then on, I tried to keep an open mind about every pony I met.

At first it was easy. I kept an open mind to anypony I met. As time wore on, however, I found it became easier and easier to slip back into the easy way of looking at things. I came to understand what Celestia meant when she said that it was an effort to think this way. It’s so easy to fall into a routine. I have to keep reminding myself: this is what a friend would do.

This is what I would do.