This is a short story about my early recollections of the Chinese language and one phrase in particular “happy”. Where did it come from and is there any meaning to it.
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to good for you living.
Today I would like to share a little story about language and definitions.
Now before schooling and any formal teaching my parents spoke to me in Cantonese. And as a kid you would soak it all in. You would associate words to behaviours, actions, feelings, physical objects etc.
Now if you have studied the Chinese language you would understand that most words or characters are made up of a combination of characters. The study of the written language reveals a lot about the culture and the thinking of the people.
Let me give you an example, here is the character for female or woman, and this is the character for child. When you put them together it becomes one character. They become the word “good” . Now the ancient pictographs showed a woman holding a child, it represented the feeling that you would naturally understand if you saw a mother cradling her baby. There you go a free lesson for you.
When growing up the word that I heard a lot was “Hoi Sum” a description of someone, in my scenario as a kid, being happy or joyful. And for some reason I was able to associate the word with happy. Broken down the two individual characters are “hoi” meaning open and “sum” meaning heart or middle, it can also be related to feelings, it never occurred to me that there was meaning behind happiness and how true to life that is.
Open heart, live with an open heart, express your feelings openly, this will lead to a happy life. You will also observe that those that have that feeling of happiness have their hearts open. If you seek happiness in your life then there is only one step that will lead you to the many different paths.
Open your hearts my friends. Well I hope this has been good for you – visit goodforyouliving.com like and share my videos, send me a message or leave a comment. And remember that living is good for you.