life lessons from south korea

A few weeks ago, my friend Elizabeth Ann posted this adorable planner/journal on her blog and I immediately wanted one. Aside from loving the color and the photographs inside, I thought this could finally get me on track in that ever-present struggle towards organization. Plus, I thought the front-cover slogan was very fitting and a great daily reminder to take things a day at a time. So, I ventured over to Etsy.com and, upon finding out the planner was inexpensive, bought it that same day. Knowing that the creator/seller was based in South Korea I knew it would be quite a while before I received my present to myself in the mail, so when it finally arrived yesterday I was so excited.

After unwrapping several layers of bubble wrap (for a book?) I flipped through the pages and admired the design, and even wrote a few appointments down in the calendar. I left it on my table and continued on with the day, returning to it later to write a few more things down and that's when, even after looking at multiple photos online, buying the planner, seeing it in person, and writing in it that it didn't, as I previously thought, remind me that "Life is a journey"...but that LIFE IS JOURNEY.

I laughed at myself for a solid five minutes (Even EA admitted that's what she thought it said, so at least I wasn't alone in feeling like a complete fool!), at how gaps in translation often result in hilarious takes on cliched phrases, and how funny the human mind can be (I know I learned something about the concepts of phrase completion in high school psychology...but that's buried way too far back in my brain to recall the exact term). Then I realized, that all the way from South Korea, had come a little reminder about life in the form of a very common, but in this case, mistranslated phrase: What we expect to get isn't always what ends up happening, but most of the time, those unexpected things are what make life interesting, provoke laughter and prompt us to remember to take things as they come because LIFE IS JOURNEY.