Santa Clara Meditation Column – A Witness Of Hope
It seems that as time goes by, our mind comes to ruin and becomes dirtied. Along with rapid modernization, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of mental illnesses that have affected the once-pure minds of mankind, which used to commune with nature. An ever increasing rate of suicides, shocking crimes…But in the midst of all this chaos, the feel-good news that we occasionally hear gives us warmth, courage and hope to go on.
I believe such words as frustration and abandonment did not originally exist when the world first began. In fact, I consider those words to be but conceptions derived from our weakened mind. The true mind only has hope and happiness, not frustration nor abandonment! So shall we meet a witness of hope?
Kim Soo Rim, Mrs. Kim, also known as the Helen Keller of South Korea, fluently speaks 4 languages despite the hearing impairment she has suffered from since she was a child. A former investment adviser at the world-leading investment banking firm, Goldman Sachs, Kim Soo Rim now works as a chief law examiner for Credit Suisse’s Tokyo branch. She can’t hear in her right ear, and can barely hear in her left ear with a hearing aid.
However, she fluently communicates with others and even has a higher level of language usage than most people. Kim, who couldn’t even correctly pronoun the alphabet, overcame her impairment and actualized her dream and hope only with her strong will and endurance. When her friends teased her, she chimed in, “Yes, you’re right.” When she was in high school, she memorized entire text books by heart and when from the last place in the class to third. How she learned English was particularly painstaking.
“In order to learn the word ‘I’, I felt my teacher’s mouth and throat with my hand, and mimicked exactly the motion of her tongue, vibration of the throat and intensity of air coming out from the mouth, and repeated the sound ‘I, I, I’ all day long, working not to forget it.”
Although she communicates with people by watching their mouths only, she now lives as a fabulous career woman and at the same time, gives the world hope. She instills hope in other people who have impairments or disabilities. After reading her story, they can think, “I can also do it.” No one thought it was possible and didn’t even give try to overcome. But like a miracle, she has proudly turned her life around.
It seems Kim Soo Rim never knew abandonment and frustration. As actions are only results of thoughts, it is important to always think optimistically. The reason why Soo Rim overcame such hardship was because her mind was full of positive thoughts.
Ask yourself, “What kind of thoughts do I have right now?” If we could erase the negative thoughts with a ‘thought eraser’, we would only see hope and peace in our future. Now the only task left to do is to find that ‘thought eraser.’
Source: WisdomsWebzine.com
