All Things Yummy

Happy New Year Everyone!

People call it the Chinese New Year, but it’s also the Korean New Year, or Seol-Nal… though I guess the best name to call it would be the Lunar New Year, not to slight all the other cultures in Asia that celebrate the New Year with the lunar calendar system. If I was in Korea, I would be considered to be a 24 year old starting from today - that’s right, twenty-four… (And all of you in my class, that’s twenty-five for you old fogies).

That’s a scary thought, to think that I’m just 10 weeks or so away from entering the Real Life ™. After all this training and school, everything seems so anticlimatic. It seems like everyone just graduates, finds a nice stable job, and settles into this depressing routine of work, sleep, and TV. All that optimism from the youth - that idealistic view about how the world can be changed for the better - surprisingly quickly dissipiates when faced with the hard realities of life. Especially without the spiritual anchor, I wonder what people are feeling as they go through their daily drudgery… But then again, after reading things like how content the couch potatoes are, it makes me wonder whether it’s me that’s different from the majority mob that rules this planet. What was it that Richard Bach said in his Jonathan Livingston Seagull?

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight–how to get from shore to food and back again… For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.”

Reminiscing about Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, which I had originally read when I was back in Korea - I must’ve been 9, 10 at the time - makes me think about all the books I had read years and years ago. The significance and poignancy of all those great literature is finally resonating with me as I’m learning more and more about the real life that’s out there. When I had originally read it, I had no idea why they were held in such reverance… and now I’m starting to realize and - even more importantly - understand it all. Maybe I am growing up… Which means I’m also losing that childhood innocence.

Anyway, here’s my belated New Year’s Resolution, which is aptly on another New Years Day. I would like to be a seagull for whom the flying matters more than the food. I would like to be that seagull who is flying up above everything, enjoying the searing wind, the bright sun, the overhead view of the world, even if it’s a little lonely up there. There is more to life than getting from shore to food and back again.

PS. All this reminiscing makes me want to play Yut-Nori. It’s a wonderful, fun, and very easy game that Koreans play on the New Years Day. I’m pretty sure I still have a set of sticks and the board somewhere in my house. Anyone interested?