Park Jiwon (Yeonam)
What "obvious" thing in my daily life did I never once question today?
📝ONGO's Reflection
Yeonam traveled to Qing China with a diplomatic mission. He saw the same things the others saw, but what he wrote was entirely different. The rest recorded the emperor's majesty; Yeonam recorded a heap of dung by the roadside — marveling at how well it had been stacked. The landscape of the world we see is shaped by our gaze. What Yeonam teaches us is not how to go somewhere new, but how to see the same place differently. Even today's commute could become a scene in someone's travel diary.
"The path is not in some unknowable place. It lies right between the river and the hill."Park Jiwon (Yeonam), 熱河日記 渡江錄 (Jehol Diary, Crossing the River)
🌱Apply It Today
Take one of your most familiar places — home, the office, your regular café — and spend five minutes looking around it as a foreigner seeing it for the first time. The shape of the chairs, the color of the walls, the expressions on people's faces. Where familiarity fades, curiosity sprouts.
