Korean Expat Community for National Disasters

“Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.” Those are the words of George MacDonald, a wonderful writer from the bygone days in his book Phantastes. He is also the one who inspired several of the world’s favorite writers. For this podcast, I will perhaps continue on the subject of grief, which often follows after a disaster. And we will, once again, consult the insights from a therapist in a YouTube channel called “Film Therapy”, on the popular Pixar movie called “Up”, which is also about grief. In that movie, we can see an old man who just gave up with life after losing his wife. He just left everything in order to go to a final place that reminds him of his wife and afterwards, maybe just die there. Beside detachment, we also think of finality of everything after loss or grief, that this will be just it forever, that no good can ever come afterwards. But as we can see in the movie, the old man was presented by life with a persistent chance to be happy again, by realizing that there are people who need us, though, like us, we can be pretty stupidly unaware of it. Yes, though we may think that we do not need other people or at least, the one whom we need the most is already gone, there are people who need us, though we also feel guilty and useless. We can also get some encouragement from the speech of Sam in the movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: "I know! It’s all wrong! By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something." “What are they holding on to, Sam?” Frodo then asked. To which Sam replied: “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.” Life is an adventure, and as long as we continue living, there is always something worth fighting for, there are still many side quests that will keep appearing for us. It is never ending. As what another great English writer, G.K. Chesterton once said, adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.