This weblog publish incorporates spoilers.
Just a few weeks in the past, I mirrored on the Netflix drama collection, When Life Offers You Tangerines, and the teachings it triggered concerning the need of communal assist.
In as we speak’s weblog publish, I want to share just a few musings on one other lesson from the hit drama collection — specifically, the ability of self-compassion.
Self-compassion is just not the identical factor as feeling sorry for oneself. It’s a non-defensive posture of recognizing the fact of the damage one might need skilled and lengthening grace to oneself. In a tradition (Korean) that prioritizes the sacrifice of the self for the collective good, I used to be struck by themes associated to self-compassion that quietly however unmistakably emerged in When Life Offers You Tangerines.
Psychologist Kristin Neff (2003) asserts that self-compassion includes three key parts: (a) an extension of kindness to oneself, (b) an understanding that different individuals additionally expertise struggling — that’s, the universality of ache, and (c) a balanced perspective that totally acknowledges the fact of 1’s ache, however on the identical time doesn’t let the struggling turn into all-consuming.
Though all three dimensions are arguably current in numerous moments of the collection, I want to highlight the third dimension: this balanced, maybe paradoxical perspective about one’s struggling. In When Life Offers You Tangerines, self-compassion is maybe most strongly illustrated when the primary characters Ae-sun and Gwan-sik, first as middle-aged after which later as aged couple, wrestle with the agonizing ache of the loss of life of their younger youngster a few years in the past. Understandably, this loss is a traumatic occasion, with lifelong implications for the protagonists.
True to the notion that self-compassion requires the complete embracing of life’s aches, When Life Offers You Tangerines doesn’t shy away from the depiction of the horrible ache within the hearts of Ae-sun and Gwan-sik. Though it isn’t the primary storyline, the loss of life of their youngster is an unmistakable a part of who they’re. As older adults, and even to the second of Gwan-sik’s loss of life as an aged individual, the grief of their loss is overwhelming and heart-wrenching. In some scenes of the drama collection, the ache and all the associated feelings, similar to parental guilt, push the protagonists to the literal flooring, their curled-up our bodies convulsing as they sob, unable to overlook the passing of their youngster.
However that is exactly the place the necessity for a balanced perspective manifests clearly via the lives of Ae-sun and Gwan-sik. Whereas totally recognizing the legitimacy of the troublesome experiences which have taken place, When Life Offers You Tangerines tenderly however powerfully speaks to the deserves of persistence even in sorrow. That’s, the drama collection argues that life is to be lived, found out, and sure, loved, even when life concurrently presents a lot turmoil. There may be an unmistakable acknowledgement of the additive nature and performance of life’s anguish; Ae-sun and Gwan-sik expertise ache on prime of ache, they usually grapple with them as greatest as they’ll. However as clear as the fact of struggling, so are the moments in life crammed with pleasure, love, and happiness for Ae-sun and Gwan-sik; whether or not it’s the celebration of their daughter’s marriage ceremony, or the enjoyment that follows the eventual, deserving breakthrough in a enterprise endeavor, the ache of the previous and the current can’t diminish the presents which are firmly current on this couple’s world. Certainly, maybe one would possibly even go so far as to say, in step with the self-compassion perspective, life’s ache makes its shiny spots that a lot sweeter; one can’t exist with out the opposite.
