I subscribe to Vittles online magazine because I’m too lazy and incompetent to prepare or look up is one of my favorite hobbies and because I’m always learning something by reading. In a recent edition, I discovered a fascinating Korean suffix. “There are no thoughts, only meongthe suffix in Korean used for activities of staring in silence, such as bull meong – staring into the fire,” the author, Songsoo Kim, said in a beautiful article with recipes about preparing a feast that I really want to eat, but absolutely will not cook.
As a black belt viewer of silence – which is my other favorite hobby – this spoke deeply to me. I asked Kim about it and she explained meong (also wrote mung) is colloquially used to describe zoning out, but without a negative connotation. This, she explained, was “an organic linguistic development, as more and more people began to mention how staring together at the fire at campsites or fireplaces was rather healing.” There are also forest, foliage and water versions of quiet, blank stares and cafes where you can hit “mung”. “This is a moment we all need,” Kim said.
We do. I’ve always been a big fan of that Blaise Pascal saying: “All mankind’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” (which I often whispered crossly to myself while my husband taking on another self-imposed DIY challenge (which involves him turning off the water and wifi). If Pascal had met a smartphone, I feel he would have added “without his phone”. We are overstimulated and our buzzing and clicking brains need quiet, no-thought time.
It is almost irresistible to look elsewhere for philosophies of life that can be summed up in one, usually misunderstood, word. South Korea is also home to an annual “space out” competition, where people try to do nothing for the longest time, suggesting a desire to address mental overload and our collective need for mental silence. And despite a brief flurry of interest, nothing – a kind of similar Dutch term, meaning “doing nothing”, never quite achieving hygge-like global traction. So if we want to adopt (and probably misunderstand) another word to improve our lives, could this be the year of meong?
