Fulfilling My Late Grandfather’s Wish

Fulfilling My Late Grandfather's Wish

(Questioner)Hi Bumrum Sunnim
Thank you so much for coming again.

I have a question about something,
I have wanted to do for a very long time.

My grandfather and my father are
from North Korea.

My grandfather has long passed.

He had dying wish to go to North Korea,
pay his respects to his mother's grave.

My father tried to help my grandfather
do that by suggesting.

My grandfather come to the United States,
and then they have to go through China.

My grandfather said,
"Absolutely not. I want to go straight,

from where I lived at the time in Seoul,
go up to Sinuiju."

A journey he was never able to make.

I grew up in this country,
but my parents didn’t tell me much about Korea.

I grew up wanting to learn more about it
and about my family.

Only my father's father, from that side
of the family made it to South Korea.

I don’t have any relatives
from my father’s side.

My mother was an only child,
so I have no relatives on her side either.

I work in the film industry.

While in college, I received a grant
to record my grandfather’s oral history

of escaping North Korea during the Korean War.

I have long held this hope.
Some day I would be able to go to North Korea.

Somehow find
my great grandmother's grave.

Pay my respects even though
my grandfather could not.

Of course, I know that it's very difficult
for Americans to go to North Korea.

I also know in the context of just
everything that's happening in the world.

My responsibilities as a mother and my desire
to work on sustainability

I wonder if my attachment to want to go and fulfill this dream is foolish.

And also within the context of all the politics, every time I say something to my parents about how I want to go to North Korea or even South Korea,

They're just like,
"Oh, it's so dangerous don't go."

I'm just curious Sunnim,
how you would advise me? Thank you.

We live as we live you know, sometimes we fulfill our goals.

Of course, not all our desires come true.

Perhaps you know, we actually don't get our way more often than we get our way.

At the same time we also cannot satisfy others' desires of us

This is the realities of our lives.

If you accept the reality of our lives that go on this way, then there's no cause for suffering.

We often kind of mistake ourselves.

So we often attached to that idea that all our dreams or all our desires should come true

or we decide or pre decide that all our goals should be achieved.

That's why we get disappointed which leads to suffering when some of them don't come true.

You're not suffering just because your desire did not come true.

You're suffering because you have this expectation that all your goals should be achieved and your desire should come true.

So if we make an effort to achieve our goals, if it does come true, then that's great

but if it doesn't, that's also okay because it happens so often.

And if you want to try again, if you want to, you know, achieve it, try again, then try again

and take lessons learned from your previous failure and adjust your strategy.

You can always stop quit

and if you try again with a different strategy, it might happen

but then again, it might not

you can quit then

but if you still want to achieve that goal, then you try again, adjust again, strategies again and try again

and that's our lives.

Why does that lead to suffering?

so the suffering happens because we expect to achieve something once or twice when it should really take 10 attempts to actually get there.

So we want to achieve that results faster based on the little effort that we put in.

It's not the failure to achieve your goals that causes suffering it's the expectation that you should achieve your goals.

The same thing with the, the desires that others have for us.

There are often times we suffer because we were not able to satisfy what our parents wish of us or satisfy what our children expect of us.

And we often suffer because we think we disappointed our parents, our family members by not being able to fulfill their desires of us.

But then again, we can't, we can't fulfill everybody's expectations of us

and we suffer because we mistake into thinking that we can actually fulfill all of our other desires of us.

We overestimate ourselves.

I mean we're not this all powerful being that can actually grant everybody's wishes.

If we can, let's do

if we can't we just apologize and, go on

and you're not apologizing because you did something wrong.

We're apologizing because you know that in their shoes, we're not able to fulfill what they want of us.

So to summarize basically sometimes our dreams, our goals come true sometimes they don't and sometimes we can actually satisfy others's desire of us sometimes we can't.

And that's life and the fact of that that's life should not be a cause for suffering.

So going back to your question,

grandfather wanted to go back to where he was born in North Korea and pay his respects to his mother's grave

but he wasn't able to go back to North Korea due to the geopolitics of the region.

So he asked his son in my stead can you go back and

pay your respects to your grandmother?

But due to the prevailing geopolitics of the day
that continues,

he wasn't able to fulfill that wish either

That it's not great suffering

It's just the fact that,
it wasn't possible to achieve.

You take that wish that
you have inherited and say,

you know what it's going to be tough to do
so I can't do it and that's okay.

If you really want to fulfill
your grandfather's wish, then you can try.

Maybe I'll come to you maybe you won't.

All you can do is
try your best if you want to do it

Saying that should not
lead to any suffering.

This is not a matter of issue of you
being foolish or wise.

If you feel burdened by this
then that is foolish.

But to have this as your aspiration,
I think it's a good thing.

Because there's nothing that tells
you have to have this aspiration or not.

That's really your choice.

Basically, my recommendation is
do what you want.