Through the Looking Glass, Splat

We all approach an issue from a point of view, that point of view being the accumulation of experiences we have had. None of us is perfectly objective. None of us is pure.

When we step to the looking glass, the mirror, what do we see? I'm referring to a literary mirror here, one that reflects who we are in our writings, our conversations, our thoughts.

Well, for starters, like when we look in the real glass mirror, we don't see what others see. Some of us see the flaws, the weak grammar and typos. Others go directly to the strengths, the crisp insights, poetic expressions or original wit. Mostly we bounce back and forth between the two, and because we know what others cannot possibly know about who we are and where we've been, we think we see ourselves better than they do.

But that is not always the case, is it? Sometimes our friends see things we don't. They see that we are jumping to conclusions or are overly emotional and they try to calm us. Sometimes they see pimples where we see clear white skin. Or brown, what does it matter? Sometimes they have had a different set of experiences that holds them up as more expert than we are on certain topics.

I can program a pong game but I can't program an Angry Bird in a gravity-influenced orbit heading for a green pig behind a wobbly wall of cement and wood. Some people know more than we know in certain subject areas. A lot of people know a lot more than we do.

Then why are we so resistant to ideas that others offer up, or criticisms? Why do we get our backs up, our bruised esteem virtually begging for nourishment from others?

In spite of this, inside our brains, we still FEEL whole and often superior? We are so confident of what we know. Even if we trend toward the big "I" on the linear scale of Ignorance versus Enlightenment.

Therein likes the rub. The word "confidence". It is inside us. An emotion. A pride. An ego. Sometimes it is not even very confident, it is a stiffening in defense, a resistance to critique. We can accept that someone else has more facts than we do. We cannot accept that they are BETTER THAN US.

And so we argue and deny and make up excuses, or head off on a tangent, to prove the grand intelligence and wit of us.

Well, we need new mirrors. Because we are each, in our own way, nothing more than a piece of shit dropped by God on a dung-filled planet, granted a brief time on earth to grow. Or not to grow.

Those who deny, who make excuses, who blame. The victims. They remain dung.

Those who apply their brains to discipline their emotions and seek unfettered knowledge and creative expression, and even joys in the tribulations that invariably roll through, emerge from the shit world as worthwhile. These are people who learn that respect is important and accepting responsibility is honorable.

Interestingly, they need not prove they are better than others. They comprehend that such comparisons are not important. In fact, they understand what they are made of . . . the good, the bad, the ugly . . . and are not judgmental about it at all. They require no looking glass at all.

They simply live well.