[One Thousand Characters a Day] Person, Your Flower Language Is Loneliness <4>

Editor's NoteToday’s “One Thousand Characters a Day, Ten Thousand Steps a Day” newsletter introduces a transcribed sentence from author Lee Dong-young’s ＜Saram-a, Neo-ui Kkotmal-eun Oeroum-ida＞ (Person, Your Flower Language is Loneliness). The reason this author compares people to flowers is that the emotion of loneliness is the flip side of the desire to have one’s blooming self noticed. Just as “when I called his name, he came to me and became a flower,” our flower language is loneliness, reflecting our wish to have our existence acknowledged by others. And within a garden filled with various shapes, colors, and fragrances, people are “each of them” and “all of us.” The author encourages people to “sway like flowers, be beautiful like flowers, be fragrant like flowers, and live loving themselves as they are?willingly accepting the fate of blooming and withering like flowers?hoping they overcome the wind without breaking.” The text contains 886 characters.

On the broadcast, Lee Hyori was shown teaching a couple staying at the lodging ‘couple yoga.’ Lee Hyori instructed them to stand facing each other and to quietly look at each other with neutral expressions. She then said that when she did this, she realized, “Lee Sang-soon’s expression isn’t as bright as I thought!”

“Ah, a bright expression is the effort this person makes for me!”

There is a case where “not expressing is also a form of expression.”

In the past, when the couple Sean and Jung Hye-young appeared together on SBS ＜Healing Camp (Episode 163)＞, there was a memorable interview.

Jung Hye-young confessed that she once saw her husband’s exhausted back in the shower room. She needed to go shower, but since her husband didn’t come out for a long time, she opened the shower door and found Sean sitting heavily on a bath chair, enduring the hot shower water endlessly because he was so worn out. Sean had ridden a bicycle for 18 hours and then driven all the way to Yangyang, Gangwon-do, to travel with his wife. On days he ran a marathon, when his wife asked where he had been since morning, he would say, “I went to a race!” and immediately play with the children without showing any signs of fatigue. He never lay down saying he was tired. So Jung Hye-young thought that even an Ironman triathlon was “no big deal,” but after always seeing his calm appearance, discovering him sitting heavily under the shower water made her realize anew, “My husband was struggling too.”

Sacrifice is a high-level form of love within the realm of unexpressed expression.

The art of “expression,” done on the premise of love, is a task accompanied by the metaphor of urgency. There is no eternal love anywhere or for anyone. Because eternal love does not exist, urgent love exists here and now, for me and my people.

- Lee Dong-young, ＜Saram-a, Neo-ui Kkotmal-eun Oeroum-ida＞, illustrated by Lee Seul-a, Daban, 16,800 KRW