Mirrors

I recently realized how undeserved of being a human being I am when I had the opportunity to see my reflection in a mirror.

I made an absolutely ridiculous face, and then I couldn’t stop laughing.

I looked into the mirror again, made another face, and then kept laughing.

I looked into the mirror again, made another face, and then doubled over laughing.

There I was, a person who struggles to see the goodness in other people, struggles to see the inherent meaning in the universe and struggles to empathize with the day-to-day problems of my fellow man. And I was having the time of my life by standing in front of a mirror and doing my best James Dean.

I am the product of billions of years of evolution. Something happened eons ago that allowed the possibility of existence. Then there was Earth. From there living beings struggled ferociously to survive. Amoeba floated around and did things. Then multi-celled organisms floated around and did things. Then there were fish, then land mammals and homo sapiens and civilization. There were millions of years, an unimaginable amount of time, of hard work done by living creatures in order to get to this moment. There have been wars and death and disease and birth and life and love.

And this is where I am.

I have a brain. I have this unlimited consciousness and (even if I say so myself), a pretty decent level of intelligence. And the best that I can do with it is stare at a mirror and laugh at the idiocy that gets reflected back at me.

I might as well be an animal. A dog or a squirrel would have the capacity to do exactly what I was doing. They have the same ability to laugh at themselves in a mirror.

I could be changing the world, or at least trying to. I could be researching medicinal cures or investigating about the human condition or building a house or speaking to another human being and sharing in their experience of the world. But I'm not. I’m looking at a mirror. I'm making faces at the mirror. I'm laughing at the faces (the ones that I’ve made) that appear on the mirror in front of me.

I could be doing so much.

But I’m enjoying myself.