Life Is a Series of Replays

What if you can live your life again? Not just once, but many times. Would your life become better or worse?

Photo by Debbie Ducic on Unsplash

A River Tale

There once lived a man who searched for a sage to answer his life-long question. Many years later, he finally found the sage he was looking for. As the two met by a river, the man asked, “Is it possible to step into the same river twice?” To this, the sage replied, “Young man, it is not possible to step into the same river even once.” Heraclitus was the attributed sage who argued that everything changes and thus nothing remains the same ever.

The Case of Language Learning

Mother Tongue

I beg to differ. In my life experience, both professional and personal, life feels like the same experience played over and over again. Take language for instance. I am writing in English but my mother tongue is Korean. I happen to remember the first time I was able to read a book. I learned to read late. It was only in the second grade I could read by myself. I skipped picture books because they were not available in the remote mountain village I grew up. To make it worse, my family moved during the formative first grade. We moved from a small farming village to the second biggest city in Korea, Busan. The transition was hard for me. I had to adjust to a…