Extra two hours a day

By Kim See-bong

I often look back upon my 60-year life and realize that I have achieved nothing to speak of, nothing to harvest out of my life.

The years gone by are mirrored in me only with regret, repent and longing for something missed. ``I shouldn't or needn't have done so" is the only excuse that covers all my past life. ``I could have done better otherwise or should have known better" is the principal comment of my life report.

And the consequent deep sigh of repent, pressing down upon my heart, engulfs the whole past years and the sigh thus released shatters to such pieces all my beautiful dreams I have so far cherished that I can't even remember what they were now.

However, it consoles me that though I haven't achieved what I purported to, there's one thing I am proud of ― that I have become an early bird. In English, there is a saying that the early bird catches the worm or that the early man never borrows from the late man. In Spanish, the saying is that ``Al madrugar, Dios le ayuda. (At daybreak, God will help you.)" All these sayings praise early rising. For me, maximum five hours of sleep a day has been sufficient for the past tens of years.

Since student days, I have been in a habit of getting up at 4 a.m. and later with age at 5 o’clock every morning and the exception is only when I very rarely drank too much the night before. Thanks to this habit, I have lived one or two more hours a day than ordinary people. This still remains a driving force of my life at a retiring age.

My office is within five minutes' walk of my apartment, so close that by 5:30 a.m. I always find myself at my desk in the office. And I start to read books for an hour or so. Some of which I read repeatedly and others are new. In any case the first book I reach for is the Bible. If possible, I try to take advantage of these quiet hours reading books requiring deep thought.

One morning I learned of the diversity in the translation of the Bible. For example, John the Baptist says that ``In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In the French New Testament, the Word is le Verbe (movement). And in ``the Word was with God," ``with” is translated into ``turned toward.” In Greek the Word is logos (the rational power that governs and develops the universe). And God is dias (day) in Spanish which means light.

To paraphrase them again in the way of Jung Ichun, a teacher of Zhu Xi, a great scholar in ancient China, who said; Our body came into being after the Creation, and our spirit existed before the Creation, and the Creation originated from the spirit, ``In the beginning was the Spirit and the Spirit was turned toward the Light (reason) and the Spirit was the Light."

To sum up, who are the Word and God? ― a man. A human being is a subject with spirit that moves and thinks rationally and plans for himself. The East and the West meet here in the philosophy that Man is God. This is one of the matutinal lessons I learned.

Anyway, to return to the subject, the quietness, peacefulness and happiness that I feel for these two hours are beyond words. With the silence so early in the morning, my intelligence fully recovered from the fatigue of the day before and the roomy mind which can prepare with composure for the day to come, what could there be yet to be desired? Here I sometimes become a prince or other times a king in a fairy tale or a chairman of the biggest business group.

Were I without these blessings, how miserable my life would be! Despite all my regrets and complaints about my past, it gives me a great consolation that I am a blessed man because I meet the universe before it wakes up and this consolation is big enough to indulge all the regrets about the past that I have lived wrong.

This morning I read that ``Silence is God, Beginning of Beginnings.” Now I feel myself closer to understanding Him. These two hours at peep of dawn I feel more of the Silence. They are the hours when I meet the Word! ― to dawn upon myself.

The two hours are the armor and helmet of my life and brace me up against the weight of mundane life. The two hours are the achievement that makes my life abundant in poverty and thus worth living. Now I am the richest man because I have the extra two hours.

The writer is principal of Polyglot Day School in Bundang, Gyeoggi Province. He can be reached at glsacademy@dreamwiz.com .