Tao for Travelers: Reading the Signs

In Korean, there are two forms of the future (that I've learned so far...). One is the definite future -- it will be a holiday tomorrow. The second is the "probable future," that is, all the things that probably will happen, like "I will go to Korea." In Korean this is said, "한극에 간 거예요," meaning it's probable I will go. I personally live in a probable future mentality and this was true long before I got to the probable future in my Korean textbook. With things that will happen in time, I often experience it like the area under the curve which comes up in calculus as an infinite series of steps. We arrive at the answer by integration of the small steps into a single number. In the real world this was most vividly illustrated for me by waiting for 12am, January 1, 2000, and the start of the new millennium. Or would we get stuck in the infinite divisions of time?  I felt like the countdown to my trip was in that space/time trap. Probably I would go, but maybe not.  But then, as Dr. Seuss put it so brilliantly in Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now?, "The time had come, so Marvin went." The time had come and so I went, or came, depending on how you look at it. I got to Korea.  

One description of beginning language learners is that they will have trouble understanding and will make mistakes in speaking. This is certainly what is happening to me as I walk around Itaewon, the Seoul neighborhood where I am staying. People are on the kind side -- put it this way, it's not like trying to speak badly accented French in Paris. One thing about my beginner level of proficiency is that I can tackle signs, and there are lots of them. Hangul, the Korean alphabet, is, by now, nearly as invisible to me as the Latin alphabet. I rarely know what the words mean, but I can say them, at least quietly to myself. And I love the way the signs are written. Korean is composed in syllables, and signs play with syllables in an infinite variety of ways. Having only recently come to appreciate the syllable, I am delighted by this, like a baby with a mobile. 

Which brings me to this encouraging sign I saw on a walk around the neighborhood, happily in English -- "No worries, Br*. It will be fine. D*. Wait. Trust."