The Law School Times Column (로스쿨타임즈 칼럼)
Jeongyun April Hur (CEO, Emotionography)
Originally published in Korean in the Law School Times, March 14, 2025 — original article
Every time we turn a page of the calendar, we cross countless thresholds that go by the name of "beginning." A new year, a new semester, a new job. But a beginning is not the moment the numbers on the calendar change; it is the moment the heart is made new. Once we realize this, a beginning becomes possible at any time. The true beginning is the moment I grant myself permission to begin.
The Korean proverb "to begin is to be halfway there" carries a certain wisdom: taking the first step is like completing half the entire journey. Deciding to start something can indeed be the hardest part of the whole process, and the texture of the heart at that moment can shape everything that follows. For a beginning is never merely the act of starting; it is a first step taken across psychological resistance — fear, worry, anxiety. Once the current of beginning catches you, what follows can carry itself forward like momentum. A beginning does not have to be solemn or heavy. Sometimes the things we start freely, without ambition and almost by accident, bear fruit beyond anything we expected. On the other hand, when excessive seriousness becomes entangled with ambition or attachment, the threshold of beginning only grows higher. In a human world full of variables and complications, success or failure can never be explained by individual effort alone. So before beginning, it is wise to ask oneself a few questions. Is this meaningful to me regardless of whether it succeeds? If it fails, can the experience itself still be worthwhile, even enjoyable? Why am I doing this? What matters is not having a "good" reason, but knowing my own reason as precisely as I can. Only then can I truly accept whatever comes of it.
One of the emotions that blocks a new beginning is lingering regret — what Koreans call aswium. It arrives with the thought, "Couldn't I have done a little better?" Sometimes this feeling becomes fuel for the next challenge; handled poorly, it becomes a stumbling block. To deal with it wisely, we first need to experience the feeling fully. In my first semester of graduate study in the United States, I felt a deep dissatisfaction with a paper I had written. The grade was already final, but I could not let the feeling go, so I told my professor, "The grade won't change, but I'd like to rewrite it anyway" — and I spent the entire winter break struggling to rewrite that paper. My professor said to me then: writing a better paper next time is always possible, but learning to accept the regret is itself an important lesson. Looking back, that winter was not really about finishing a paper. It was the season I learned how to receive this feeling, and how to hold it.
Lingering regret is not intense like grief, nor does it come with a clear ending like accomplishment. Like a drizzle so fine you cannot tell whether it is falling at all, this emotion is easy to ignore — and precisely for that reason, it settles quietly into a corner of the heart and stays. To process it properly, we need to acknowledge it, breathe deeply, feel it as it is, and stay inside it for a while. You can tell whether your regret has been well digested by watching how your heart responds when you happen to encounter its object again. Does it still sting? Or can you pass it by lightly — "ah, that was then"? There is no right answer. What matters is simply noticing: so this is where my heart is now.
Making room in the heart for a new beginning is not a matter of summoning willpower; it is a process of working through one's inner emotions toward self-integration. Two psychological reasons support this. First, when unresolved emotion remains, it becomes difficult to see a new situation as it actually is. Like looking at the world through clouded glasses, the shadow of past regret distorts new experience. After a failure, for instance, if we take on a new challenge without having digested the regret, the old memory surfaces without warning, and we slip easily into self-doubt and negativity.
Second, there is a real difference between beginning from a state in which emotion has been healthily released and beginning without it. Through the psychological process of cognitive reappraisal, past experience can be reframed as a teacher, and the new beginning can be seen in a positive light. This means no longer reading a painful experience simply as failure, but reinterpreting it for the lessons and growth it contains. If we can look warmly at what a failure taught us, the next challenge becomes lighter and freer. But when the old emotion has not been resolved, we are more likely to grow defensive before new opportunities, or to flinch away at the decisive moment without knowing why. To make the most of what comes next, we must learn to handle lingering regret with wisdom.
Fully digesting regret is precious time spent building resilience. The growth mindset — "I can change; I can become better" — takes root only when past experience can be reinterpreted in a positive light. As a tree that has endured winter sends out stronger branches in spring, a heart that has fully accepted its regret prepares for deeper growth. It is an extreme example, but the person I always think of as having handled this feeling most movingly is Fugui, the protagonist of the Chinese novelist Yu Hua's To Live. Born into a wealthy family, Fugui squanders the fortune through dissipation, and amid the upheavals of modern Chinese history he loses his family one by one. In the end — wife, son, daughter, grandson all gone — he is left alone. And in that moment, Fugui says that he must have been blessed with the fortune of having people to miss.
A line in a ruling, a sentence in an argument, a single question on an exam — on the law school journey and along the path of a legal career, we meet this feeling again and again. But human beings are, unavoidably, imperfect. What matters is acknowledging that imperfection and finding the courage to begin again while still carrying the regret. The process of looking back at ourselves through our mistakes and shortcomings, and slowly making up for what we lack, becomes the foundation of growth. If we could begin perfectly, with no regret at all, that would of course be wonderful. But since we cannot, what we can realistically pursue is the strength of heart to keep moving forward while handling our regret with wisdom. More important than the beginning itself is the heart with which we begin. When we can receive our longing and our lingering regret as blessings, we finally cross the threshold of a true beginning.
