[How About This Book] Why Are We Always Standing on a Threshold?

Jeong Eunhye's "Try Living Your Good Day"
An essay that rearranges the time of wandering
The in-between "threshold space" that is neither stability nor leap
Reframing life's "time of wandering" without hasty encouragement or comfort

"Try Living Your Good Day" is wary even of the phrase "let's live well." This essay by Jeong Eunhye, an art therapist and eco-artist who has settled in Jeju, does not follow the formula of success stories or healing books. It does not present goals or make definitive statements about the direction of life. Instead, it places at the forefront one recurring state that has run through her life: the time of wandering, and the "threshold space (liminal space)" in which that time inevitably occurs.

Art therapist and eco-artist Jung Eunhye says in "Try Living Your Good Day" that the state of the "threshold," being nothing and at the same time able to become anything, is precisely the time when humans accumulate the most change. He reinterprets this unstable middle ground not as failure but as an inevitable process in which perception and thought expand. Photo by Ara's Garden

This book asks not "How should we live?" but "Why are we always standing on a threshold?" The depression and isolation of her years as an immigrant in Canada, the work in psychiatric wards and youth shelters, and the subsequent trajectory of her life into the forests and seas of Jeju all converge into a single line of inquiry. Life does not line up in a straight line, nor does it accumulate according to plan. Rather, the more winding it becomes, the more the senses come alive, and in the very moment we lose our way, thought expands. This is closer to a record of observing the structure of a life repeatedly passed through than to a mere list of personal experiences.

The core concept Jeong Eunhye presents is the "threshold": a state that is nothing and at the same time can become anything. In this in-between zone, which is neither stability nor leap, humans feel most anxious. Yet she says that it is precisely at this point that thought and the senses become most active. This book does not define this time as failure or delay, but rearranges it as an inevitable process that comes repeatedly to everyone. The perspective is that the time that appears to be at a standstill is in fact the segment in which the greatest changes are accumulated.

What makes this book compelling is that psychology, art, and ecological sensibility are not separated but woven together into a single mode of thought. The inner adversary known as "part x," along with lack and habit, anxiety and control, is not reduced to defects of personality or will. Instead, the book points out that these are structures formed within relationships, environments, and repeated conditions. The solutions it offers are closer to "soothing" and "living together with" than to overcoming or eliminating. This is not just language that works only inside a therapy room; it extends directly as a question to the many readers living in a society where performance and self-management pressures have become routine.

Jeong Eunhye's gaze does not remain fixed on humans alone. Her thinking extends into an "ecological self," reaching out to forests and seas, to coral and even plastic particles. Connecting with nature does not make individual suffering disappear. What changes instead are the size and the location of that suffering. The phrase she repeatedly invokes, "cosmic and at the same time nothing," is not a proposal to shrink or ignore problems. It is closer to an appeal to rearrange them on a different scale so that they can once again become bearable. The recovery this book speaks of arises not from sealing up emotions but from a shift in perception.

Its stance on happiness is also firm. The argument that we should not defer the present by chasing a non-existent "10 out of 10 happiness," and the statistical and experiential reasoning that "7 out of 10 happiness" is enough, are not sensational but persuasive. In the passages where it distinguishes joy from satisfaction, and reframes stability and freedom as a matter of which kind of distress we will endure between "stifling constraint and anxiety," the book clearly reveals that, rather than offering comfort, it is demanding the reader's thought. It is the point at which it leads us to see life choices not as a matter of emotion but as a matter of structure.

"Try Living Your Good Day" does not cheer the reader on. Instead, it refuses to hastily define the reader's present. It withholds judgment on whether now is a bad day or a stretch of failure, leaving only the possibility that "this, too, may be a threshold." The book's virtue lies not in consolation but in distance. That distance allows the reader to step back and look at their own life anew. And from that vantage point, the reader is finally led to ask for themselves whether they can call today "my good day."

Try Living Your Good Day | Jeong Eunhye | Ara's Garden | 324 pages | 19,800 won