This weblog submit comprises spoilers.
A number of weeks in the past, I mirrored on the Netflix drama sequence, When Life Provides You Tangerines, and the teachings it triggered concerning the need of communal assist.
In at this time’s weblog submit, I want to share just a few musings on one other lesson from the hit drama sequence — particularly, the facility of self-compassion.
Self-compassion just isn’t the identical factor as feeling sorry for oneself. It’s a non-defensive posture of recognizing the truth of the harm 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 Provides You Tangerines.
Psychologist Kristin Neff (2003) asserts that self-compassion includes three key elements: (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 truth of 1’s ache, however on the identical time doesn’t let the struggling change into all-consuming.
Though all three dimensions are arguably current in numerous moments of the sequence, I wish to highlight the third dimension: this balanced, maybe paradoxical perspective about one’s struggling. In When Life Provides You Tangerines, self-compassion is probably 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 little one 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 Provides You Tangerines doesn’t draw back from the depiction of the horrible ache within the hearts of Ae-sun and Gwan-sik. Though it’s not the primary storyline, the loss of life of their little one 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 particular person, the grief of their loss is overwhelming and heart-wrenching. In some scenes of the drama sequence, the ache and the entire associated feelings, reminiscent of 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 little one.
However that is exactly the place the necessity for a balanced perspective manifests clearly by the lives of Ae-sun and Gwan-sik. Whereas totally recognizing the legitimacy of the tough experiences which have taken place, When Life Provides You Tangerines tenderly however powerfully speaks to the deserves of persistence even in sorrow. That’s, the drama sequence argues that life is to be lived, discovered, and sure, loved, even when life concurrently presents a lot turmoil. There’s an unmistakable acknowledgement of the additive nature and performance of life’s anguish; Ae-sun and Gwan-sik expertise ache on high of ache, and so they grapple with them as greatest as they’ll. However as clear as the truth of struggling, so are the moments in life full of 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 might be 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 brilliant spots that a lot sweeter; one can’t exist with out the opposite.
