Renewal·문장 발효 과학

Live Comfortably, Without Straining. Kim Soo-hyun, Dasan Books

June 7, 2020·5 min read

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Thirty-nine? Really? Wow-

It wasn't until May, on the way to the pharmacy under the COVID-19 five-day mask rationing system, that it hit me. Until then I'd been thinking of myself as thirty-eight... or maybe thirty-seven. Honestly, after the mid-thirties I'd been living without really thinking about my age. Maybe, unconsciously, that was very deliberate. Maybe I wanted to forget that I was in my late thirties rather than the middle.

Thanks to that, lately I've been deeply worried about something as obvious as "how to live". Personally, my thirty-nine is unusually restless, unlike my twenty-nine.

Twenty-nine was about getting into society somehow, and then it was done. Now it's the grinding process of hanging on in the society I barely scraped into. The former was about using any means necessary as long as you produced results; the latter is a process you face every single moment. The former was about others; the latter is about me.

That's why I felt a strange sense of kinship in the author's prologue. Relationships were never a big worry for me either. In my department, clubs, among job-seekers, in study groups, I shared a common enemy or common goal or similar direction with the people I met. But now I don't know. I always feel fumbling. And to someone like me, through the prologue, the author throws a first realization.

"The very act of being confident about a relationship is the problem."

Honestly, anyone who hears it can say, "Obviously, I already know that." But it's hard to actually recognize it in any given moment. And even if you recognize it, acting on it is another matter. It's a lot like dieting. "Oh, I've gained a little weight?" In my twenties, I could get back to my original weight with two or three hard days, maybe a week at most. But after my mid-thirties, no matter how hard I try, it doesn't come back. The so-called basal metabolism, the hardware itself, has started to change.

For me, Kim Soo-hyun's prologue made me think: a lot of this book is going to overlap with my own life. I put down my coffee cup, adjusted my seat, and switched into focused-reading mode.

I wasn't wrong. So much of it felt like my own story. This time I couldn't carelessly fold corners or underline things. I felt like I'd have to fold too many pages. If I marked everything important, I'd just be marking the whole book and remembering nothing when I closed it. So I decided to pick a few passages and record them here on the blog.

Thanks to that, though it's taking me much longer than planned, copying over the notes I made feels like burning them into my brain, like studying, haha.

Living is a lot like doing housework: to keep living, we have to take care of our daily life endlessly. The tedious, grinding tasks, the effort to maintain daily life, have always been this way. (p.90)

Right. There are no shortcuts in housework. You have to put in the time, plain and simple. You get exactly as much as you put in. Maybe that's why I've been getting lonelier and more listless more easily lately.

In reality, I'd been putting off or replacing the small things that hold up daily life with disposables and convenience foods, fast and cheap substitutes. Instead I was reading books or using the computer; instead of staying home, I went looking for famous cafes or quiet cafes, begging for some relaxation. I thought I wasn't a neoliberal. But contrary to my thoughts, the reality of my daily life wasn't aligned with that. The small, invisible, so-called "inefficient" and "unproductive" things kept getting swapped out like that, day after day.

Of course, there are now subscription services that specialize in doing exactly those kinds of tasks for people like us. I used to think "What a great service!" and investors are paying plenty of attention too. But now, thinking about it again... "Isn't this actually a really sad, ironic thing?" I thought. It's kind of like pine pollen. Yes. "Wait, pine pollen out of nowhere?" you might ask, but I had a moment of "wow" recently.

Thanks to COVID-19, the air has been unusually clean. So I'd left my study window open for over a week. I forgot how many days, how many weeks it had been open, and only closed it when it rained. And only afterward did I realize: it was astonishing that pine pollen could fly through such a fine mesh screen and coat the room so densely. And more astonishing: something so light could pile up this densely, this solidly.

I put the book down for a moment. And I started to do, one by one, the things I'd been putting off "to save time." First I washed a rag and wiped down the study and put the rice on. Then I bundled up the comforter I couldn't remember how long I'd been covering myself with and took it to the laundromat. The big drum started spinning. While I waited, I opened the book again.

Treating things that have nothing to do with you as if their cause lies in you is called "personalization" in psychology. We often mistake the other person's problem for our own and blame ourselves. Sometimes we do need to look back on our actions, and getting hurt may be unavoidable, but at the very least, we shouldn't drag the other person's problem into our own. (p.125

Don't live in the wounds someone else made. Don't damage yourself in order to punish the other person. (p.141)

You feel impatient, anxious. Try subtracting three years from your current age. What do you think? "Back then I was so young" - three years from now, you'll feel exactly that about the you of today. (p.183)

Some relationships will disappear without even sprouting, and some will, through the natural process of time, bear the fruit of deep connection. The surest way to keep a relationship going is to change "let's meet up sometime" into "let's meet this week." Someone is waiting for you to reach out. (p.252)

I've started to understand, little by little, why thirty-nine felt so unusually restless compared to twenty-nine. I'd been pouring much more attention into others than into myself. And I'd been calibrating my own standards to theirs, watching their reactions. At first it was just "going along to get along," but over ten years, those small things had been piling up in my daily life just like pine pollen.

The washing machine, which had been rolling along lazily, starts to pick up speed. Cha-cha-cha-cha - woong woong woong - spinning fast now. I can feel the weight of it.