Mirror

We encounter many people throughout the day. Each of us becomes a point of contact for different lives and different inner states.

Sometimes a conversation, a sentence, or someone’s way of being reminds me of who I was years ago. Then a reflection appears before me, one that closely resembles the state of mind I was in back then, my world of ideas, and the dead ends I had found myself in.

I cannot help but think. How did I manage to overcome all that and arrive here? What has changed in my mind from that day to this one? Which paths have quietly closed, and which have opened? What message would I send from today to those days? If I tried to explain this to the person before me, would they understand? Or would it disturb their own path of inner growth? Would I think the same way and react the same way five or ten years from now? Or would I already have moved toward another self, different from who I am now?

In moments like these, I feel as though I am in a room filled with mirrors. A different self appears in each mirror. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man. Some young, some old. One wears a conservative expression, another a rebellious one. Another is hopeless. And another does not care about anything at all.

They all surround me at once. It is as if life turns into an interactive theater stage where I play all these versions of myself at the same time. Every role belongs to me. Every line echoes within me.

Perhaps there is only one self on that stage. Perhaps all these characters are nothing more than echoes of the same essence at different points in time. If all these selves before me knew they were, in truth, one and the same being, would they still fight so fiercely with one another?

Perhaps this is why where we come from and where we are going become impossible to explain. Where life begins and where it ends grows uncertain. The lines fade, the mirrors multiply, the reflections blend into one another. The boundary between reality and illusion dissolves.

Could it be that we are not God’s dream after all, but beings lost inside a paranoia?