Your Weekly Challenge:

REMINDER: You don’t have to do the challenge! See it as an idea on how to spend your week more productively.

Do work that’s meaningful to you. For each of the activities you listed, think about a small action you can take right now that is related to it, and commit to finish each of these actions over the next week(i.e. hike a mountain —> find a nature park in the area)

Your Weekly Inspirational Story:

“Yeongju, who leaves her (unidentified) high-pressure conventional job, divorces her conventional husband (to the horror of her conventional parents), takes her half of the money from the sale of their apartment, and realizes her childhood dream:

opening a bookshop in Hyunam-dong.

She chooses “Hyunam-dong” because the root of “hyu” stands for “rest.”

The bookstore is her new life and represents a search for some kind of feeling, some kind of self-improvement, some kind of knowledge, some kind of escape and respite.

[…]

Yeongju hires Minju as the café barista.

Also a society dropout tired of struggling to be a high achiever, Minju keeps his phone switched off so he doesn’t have to talk to his (understandably) concerned mother.

“Is my whole life a mistake?” he wonders.

To her credit, Yeongju is principled and enterprising in realizing her dream.

She posts little meditations about her favorite books on social media[…] She invites authors to speak and creates book clubs, eschewing bestsellers for indie titles.

She organizes a writing seminar and eventually undertakes a newspaper column.

[…] Thus, the bookshop collects an assortment of predictable characters—women in unhappy marriages, a lost teen, enthusiastic bookworms, visiting authors—

thereby creating a community wherein everyone can learn from the books and from each other.

A bit of tame romance is sprinkled in for good measure amid other small acts of rebellion.

Yeongju and her cohorts inch forward in life, trying to make sense of it, and, unsurprisingly, everyone seems to be better off by the end of the story.”

Source: https://www.liberreview.com/welcome-to-the-hyunam-dong-bookshop-by-hwang-bo-reum-translated-by-shanna-tan/#:~:text=It's%20a%20classic%20feel%2Dgood,her%20childhood%20dream%3A%20opening%20a

!!!- I advise you to write the answers down on paper, as they help you figure out stuff about yourself, which you might find useful later on!

Reflective-thinking question:

-Can you relate to the people in this story? If so, what makes them relatable for you?

Critical-thinking questions:

-Would you sacrifice as much as Yeongju for your childhood dream? Why or why not?

Your Weekly ‘Food For Thought’ question

Are you happy?

*Want to be featured in the next article? Send an email to [email protected] with your answer to this question, and I'll include it in the next article!