[🤝] A Small Everyday Encounter, a Large Resonance Called ‘Love Your Neighbor’

✨ Summary by Gemini 2.5 Pro 　

A day when a brief conversation with the apartment cleaning lady and one sighing sentence from her made me feel the weight of another person’s life, deeply reflect on the meaning of ‘love your neighbor,’ and widen the horizon of my awareness.

• Original: http://blog.naver.com/hyeogikarp/223874715255
• Naver published at: 2025/05/22 23:59 KST
• Original category: Relationships

Original

🗓️ Date: 2025.5.22 Thu

✨ Summary by Gemini 2.5 Pro

A day when a brief conversation with the apartment cleaning lady and one sighing sentence from her made me feel the weight of another person’s life, deeply reflect on the meaning of ‘love your neighbor,’ and widen the horizon of my awareness.

💭 Diary

Even a meaningless passing existence like an “NPC,”

once meaning is given through thought and exchange, becomes a “precious neighbor.”

These days I have been thinking about that a lot. The building cleaning lady I pass on the street is not just a passing “NPC,” but probably someone’s “mother.”

For a while now, watching my older brother and sister-in-law has made me vaguely feel how many unspeakable hardships our parents must have gone through while raising us. Maybe because of that feeling, these days my eyes have begun turning a little more toward the lives of people around me.

This morning was like that too. After finishing exercise at the apartment gym, I was heading to the apartment’s 24-hour laundry room to move the blanket laundry I had put in before going to the gym into the dryer.

In the apartment hallway, I ran into the cleaning lady working there. Normally I would have lightly bowed, said “thank you,” and passed by. But today, for some reason, the thought that I wanted to say a little more was unusually strong. So I greeted her with a bit more heart than usual: “You are working hard from early in the morning. Thank you!”

The lady stopped what she was doing for a moment, looked at me, and smiled slightly. That was how our short conversation began. I took the chance to ask something I had been curious about.

“What time do you usually clean until? If you do this every day, your back must hurt a lot. Are you okay?” “Do you have any way you take care of it?”

At my rambling, worried questions, the lady shook her head, saying she was “okay” and that she was “used to it,” but the smile never left her mouth. Then suddenly she said, “You are such a good-natured young man,” and this time she asked me questions.

“What brings you here this early in the morning? Laundry? How is the rent here? Not too expensive? How old are you? Do you maybe… have a girlfriend?”

When she brought up “girlfriend” with shining eyes, my playfulness kicked in and I answered while laughing. “Huh? Are you trying to introduce me to your daughter?”

The lady waved her hands and laughed. “Oh no, I only have two sons.” (“Ah… so close lol”)

Then she suddenly let out a small sigh and added as if talking to herself. “Sigh, what is the point of raising sons? It is all useless…”

For a moment it felt like I had been hit in the head with a hammer. That one sentence from her caused a huge ripple in my heart. “Useless… Now that I think about it, what kind of son have I been to my parents? What have I done for them so far, and what kind of son should I become for them in the future? If I were a parent, how would I want to be treated by my child?” … Thoughts kept following one after another. Of course, from the lady’s perspective, it may have been just a passing remark… but its weight was by no means light to me. Those questions did not leave my head for a long time.

Anyway, with this complicated heart and all these thoughts tangled together, as I kept chewing on the short encounter with the lady, another realization came.

All the people who pass through my life like this are, in fact, “main characters” who each carry the weight of their own life and fiercely live out each day. Even that one sentence from the lady must have held the experience and weight of her life.

How much can I learn and feel from each one of those main characters? Whatever their lives look like, the process itself is already a story.

So let me not forget. Even a meaningless passing existence like an “NPC,” once meaning is given through thought and exchange, becomes a “precious neighbor.”

Really, life changes this much depending on the eyes I use to look at it. If I see beautifully, beautiful things appear; if I force myself to find misery, then misery appears too.

This morning, the lady’s smile and bitter sentence, and all the thoughts and realizations started by the small ripple inside my heart. I want to keep them for a long time. Since I can leave reflections like this as records, I suddenly think again that it was very good I started a blog. Tomorrow, what kind of main character and what kind of story will I meet? I am, a little, looking forward to it.

Before ending the post, as these thoughts kept following one another, the core Christian teaching, “Love God, and love your neighbor,” suddenly came to me clearly again. (Of course, the “God” I am speaking of here could, for a non-Christian, be reduced and understood as something like “the best conscience each person can perceive.”)

And I also remembered a sentence I had read somewhere recently about this. When the brainwaves of people in love are measured, even though they are clearly looking at “the beloved,” the part of the brain that recognizes “me” is also activated.

Looking at that, could we interpret deep connection or love toward another person as ultimately expanding self-recognition, maybe even as an experience where the boundary of the self collapses? Thinking about it, maybe the ultimate state pursued by countless religions, theologies, and philosophies is reaching this kind of “selflessness.” In fact, voices warning against the excessive expression of the “self” always give a great resonance regardless of genre, don’t they?

If I dig deeper into this metaphysical realization, maybe I can move closer to an essential insight into what “love” is. (Of course, my personal belief remains unchanged that one of the most popular and easiest-to-understand guidelines for practicing that realization in daily life is Protestantism and the church.)

Anyway, stepping away from this metaphysical discussion for a moment and returning to reality, we cannot all literally become “parts of one another.” But the fact that the old wisdom, “love your neighbor as your own body,” feels this vivid and clear today… makes me strongly believe that this whole chain of thoughts and realizations is not simple coincidence.

Maybe all these thoughts and realizations began at different crossroads, but in the end they may be moving toward one truth - (of course, to phrase it objectively, “a truth I actively create for myself”).

Q. What neighbors are you together with?

Q. How do you want to treat them?

✨ KPT Comment by Gemini 2.5 Pro (Persona: Jaemin)