I often say this to someone soaked in passion for something:
Perseverance and passion
do not fulfill all of your hopes and dreams by themselves.
They can actually become a fatal poison for you.
In other words, passion
is a very basic prerequisite, not a necessary and sufficient condition.
To live as a human being,
you need primitive, instinctive curiosity,
you need dreams,
and you need the passion that desperately wants and hopes for those dreams.
but
what matters even more than that is
that after meeting all these conditions,
the moment you recognize that dream (not next year, not tomorrow, not tonight,
the very moment you feel it,
instinctively!
in that instant!
"Then what am I doing right now?" — that shift in thinking.
what did you do,
and because of that, what have you done up to now?
That is what matters most.
For example,
'I have no money and I am hungry' — anyone can recognize that problem.
(This is the part where dreams and passion become the premise behind everything else.)
What matters is
if I am this hungry right now,
and if that's a grievance and I want to escape it,
it shouldn't end with complaints and dissatisfaction, or with just having dreams and passion —
then... therefore,
what am I doing right now,
given that the situation is like this, then what follows?
what can I do immediately,
and what can I start with first?
The move from this kind of thinking into action
and every moment in which you think through that sequence is even more important.
For tangible achievement,
you cannot stop at thought alone;
you must put thought into action,
and the process and reasons for that action, along with your own rational conviction about what comes next and why it is valid,
must become something embedded in you, even subconsciously, moment by moment.
In short, you need to think about your thinking.
(The first kind of thinking: action based on awareness, in other words, thinking and acting.)
(뒤의 생각= 행동에 대한 인식과 다른 상황과 행위중에도
일상에서의 생활중에도 그에대한 구민과 인식이 묻어나오는 일련의 생각들이 만들어낸 생활패턴)
There is a joke that the most extreme use of a healthy strong body is day labor on a construction site,
and the most extreme form of studying English is an academy or private tutor,
and the most extreme use of an iPhone is as a fashion accessory used only for phone calls.
Not only English, but even memorizing the Bible in Latin, or
Buddhist scriptures written in classical Chinese,
matters less than
small but sincere daily acts of faith that naturally show up in ordinary life.
Dreams, the body, jobs, abilities, ...
In every part of life, a strong and polished appearance matters,
but what matters even more is
practice, the end of that practice, and recognizing yourself right now for the sake of that process.
For decades already,
because of overstimulating mass media and an overflowing flood of information and materials,
our psychological state and overworked senses have made us think about curiosity, passion, and dreams
in increasingly vague ways, or
sometimes feel that they do not matter much at all.
Or on the contrary, people become trapped in inflated dreams and passion,
and wound their own lives and the hearts of those around them
as if that were somehow only natural.
That is why the common-sense answer that is always mentioned and called the solution
that familiar answer...
the task of what is "appropriate"
for human beings, who live by thinking and therefore are full of words and troubles,
for human beings,
may be a painfully difficult task that repeats forever...
But perhaps,
it is also a way of living that is possible precisely because we are human.
(p.s. just an ordinary person’s ordinary grumbling, written without much structure...)
