It’s always around — at home, in cars, businesses, hotels, and other places you might not think about.
It’s a servant of sorts that reveals you with dead on accuracy. It’s always ready to serve you no matter how you look or feel or who you are or what you have or haven’t done or plan to do. Refuse it if you wish, but you can neither change nor intrude upon what it shows.
The item in question is a mirror.
As common as it might be, it is the only way you can view yourself as others view you. What’s unique about a mirror is that it can’t hear or feel or emote in any way. Therefore, it is powerless to judge or evaluate. All it can do is reflect what is before it. In that respect, however, it is an instrument without equal.
In a way, we should feel privileged because mirrors didn’t exist during those dawning days of civilization. The only way to see yourself back then was to gaze into a pool or container filled with still water.
Leaving all of that behind, today we use mirrors in two obvious ways — to view ourselves and to see what is behind us. Treating the second item first, what we see in most any rearview mirror triggers emotions that results in us either being satisfied or feeling the need to take a deliberate action of some kind.
That first item, however, that of viewing ourselves, is arguably just as important, maybe even more so. That’s because it doesn’t deal with conditions that could affect our safety and welfare, but rather what first and foremost is right there.
More to the point, to look closely into a mirror is to leave nothing to be imagined. It is right there, clearly, accurately, and without emotion, ready for you to either accept or reject. It reveals not what you think you look like, but what and how you appear to anyone else.
Immediately, you are drawn to the eyes — how narrow or wide, how bright or dull, how forward-looking or recessed. Far more important, however, is what, how much, and how well they project what is going on in your mind. The accuracy of that view ranges from innocent and delightful to angry and sinister.
It’s no wonder the eyes play such an important part in how we make love, position ourselves before another human being, reveal our emotions and intentions without ever saying a word. Even animals can be made friendly, fearful, or angered by how their human counterparts look at them. Neither is it any wonder why eyes are so important in legal and judicial matters.
In a lighter touch, however, mirrors reflect the full ranges of youth and beauty arising from smoothness and a readiness for the future to the classic look speaking of exposure to learning through losing and winning.
Then there is the superficial element — the hair, the clothes, the shoes. How refined or rough, how colorful or plain, how flippant or practical, how timid or courageous, how outward or inward. Or maybe there is none of that at all — just the human body radiating its own posture suggesting young, active, and forward or old, tired, and wiser for either a good or bad cause.
And finally, there is the background — an inside with its disorderly and worn furnishings or an equally telling scene of expensive, rare, and treasured items, or an outside on a porch or under a tree on a lawn speaking either of a necessarily spartan or opulent landscape.
All of this leads to the reality that if it weren’t for photographs, none of these “instants” would ever be frozen in time. Instead, they would only serve as springboards for the imagination extending from that moment into the farthest reaches of the future.
Logic fits neatly yet firmly and steadfastly into all of this not in its usual philosophical and thoughtful form, but as a highly useful tool. It’s not enough to mentally conclude what one should properly be or do, we have to supplement it with how we see ourselves. We can only do that by seeing how we appear to others.
It’s one thing to guess or imagine or even attempt to mask or fake what we are but quite another to see it as it is.
So the next time you look into a mirror remember that aside from being wonderful, useful, and simple, a mirror is always truthful.
