I was not too keen to hop on the Scent of a Woman bandwagon. The summary of the plot, after all, is: A woman is diagnosed with terminal cancer and is given only six months to live. I wasn’t sure how cancer = romantic comedy, and I was not too eager to emotionally invest in a drama that would end in tears. However, it was the hotness of Lee Dong Wook that snagged me in. (Or rather, the shower scene of all kdrama shower scenes.) My, has the military matured the man. Yummy.

So, I watched the first few episodes, and was inevitably drawn in. And I realise that’s what makes Scent of a Woman so appealing and amazing: Yeon Jae’s (ever-amazing Kim Sun Ah) struggle to live the last six months of her life in the best way possible touches a chord in all of us.

These are the lessons from Scent of a Woman:

1. Don’t live your life for others.
All the characters have been living the life the way others want them to live instead of living for their goals and dreams. Yeon Jae lived for her mother, saving every penny she earns to buy a house. Sae Kyung gave up the love of her life to marry the man her father has chosen for her. And Ji Wook (Lee Dong Wook) may be passively fighting his father’s control over every aspect of his life, but he has resigned himself to a life where he has no control over his career, whom he dates or marries. After her diagnosis, Yeon Jae awakens just in time to grab the life she wants, and she awakens this thirst in Ji Wook as well.

2. When you receive bad news, don’t give in to despair. Instead, find solutions.
Yeon Jae could’ve sunk into deep depression and spent the last six months of her life wallowing in grief. However, after allowing herself to grieve, she quickly whipped up a bucket list, and quickly set out to fulfill them.

3. Don’t live for a better tomorrow. Savour the life you have now.
So you’re saving all your money for your retirement plans. You don’t allow yourself to enjoy any of it. No vacations, pretty clothes or dinners at nice restaurants. Is this a life worth living? This was what Yeon Jae tearfully realised when she checked her big bank balance at the bank. The realisation that she had spent all those years saving and unnecessarily suffering hit her hard, but she didn’t wallow. She went all out after that, getting a complete makeover, buying expensive clothes and booking a first class ticket to Okinawa for the vacation of a lifetime.

4. Don’t hang on to bitterness.
Sae Kyung, the most despicable she-demon to ever grace a Kdrama, has every right to be angry and bitter. The men in her life has either used her or disregarded her. But she chose to hang on to the bitterness and even infected the world with it by trying to make Yeon Jae and Ji Wook’s life as misreable as hers. There’s a big part of me that wants Sae Kyung to trip over the lip of a volcano and fall in, but there’s also a part that wants her to overcome this deep anger in her to awaken to the possibilities that life could offer her. Be a blessing, not a curse to the world.

5. When on a holiday, don’t just be there – be aware.
Ji Wook is so used to coasting through life uninterested and cynical about everything that even when he’s in the vacation paradise of Okinawa, he was just not enjoying himself. Yeon Jae taught him to savour every breath of fresh air, eat weird stuff (black squid noodles) and just dance and laugh at silly things. This is the way to enjoy a vacation, by using your five senses and being aware of your surroundings. We could all learn from that.

6. Pursue your dreams – don’t wait for the perfect day to make them happen.
So you have that dream to backpack around Europe. What are you waiting for? Don’t wait for that perfect day to come because if you wait too long you may talk yourself out of it, or worse, it may never come. Yeon Jae realised that life is short and unpredictable and now with nothing to lose, she pursued all her dreams. However, she must’ve thought: Why didn’t I do this sooner?