“I’m not alone,” you say, but I wonder how long you were.
how this line from a poem changed the way I viewed self-development
I bumped into this poem by accident. I was on Amazon, doing a regular poetry book combing, when Grotesque Weather and Good People by Lim Solah (translated by Olan Munson and Oh Eunkyung) appeared on my feed.
Perhaps the cover was too pretty too resist. Perhaps the inordinate amount of K-Dramas I had recently been bingeing made curious about the contemporary Korean poetry scene.
Either way, this book made its way to me at just the right time. I was at my final year at university, and wondering, what now? Am I on track to reach the milestones I had planned for this part of my life? Do I know what I want to do in the future? Am I happy in the present?
What I hadn’t yet considered was: have I made peace with the past?
“I’m not alone,” you say, but I wonder
how long you were.
The final two lines in the poem ‘Sand’ in this collection made me realise that I had been judging myself too harshly.
Sometimes, even if everything looks fine in the present moment, we still have to take our past into account. It might take us a longer time to reach certain milestones because…
