Last Christmas, one of my friends at school said to me: “It feels like you’ve been here forever, with all the impact you’ve had.” And this line has lived in my head rent free for the rest of the winter break. Why? Because I had not been here forever. I had only been at this school for 6 months.
If you asked me, I could not name a single thing which I felt I had done, nevertheless talk about the impact I’ve had. Now, I have never been one to downplay myself. Ever since elementary I had learnt the importance of self-reflection, and commending yourself for your accomplishments.
But it had only been 6 months, and there was just something about being at a new school, new teachers, new students, new friends, new classes. It wasn’t a rough transition, I’ve settled in pretty well, but how could I have made any impact? It had only been 6 months! I was still figuring things out, I was still exploring all the different clubs and teams and getting lost going to classes because it had only been—Stop—“It feels like you’ve been here forever.” Again, I would not have agreed; the way I saw myself, was not what the World had seen of me.
Indeed, we never really see ourselves the way the World sees us. The second you wake-up, your mind has began a game of make believe. We create a persona for ourselves, We keep tabs of all the actions we’ve performed, all the times we’ve messed up. We have an internal narrator, judging every step we take.
We observe our life through a third-person perspective, but one that also happens to have access to the very deepest of our considerations.
And at the end of all that, we go to sleep, having generated our own narrative on the day that has passed.
Yet, you know this (even if you don’t want to admit it), on a more physical scale, we are the only person who doesn’t see our face as we walk down the street. If I was wearing clown make-up, with a green Mohawk, I would never know if the World just agreed to not say anything about it. A
At the same time, we often neglect the crowns on our head we deserve to wear, forget the roads we’ve conquered to be where we are now, without someone reminding us about it.
The only times we see ourselves clearl; whether it’s the clown make up, or the shining crown; is in front of a mirror, or, in this day and age, a phone camera. Sure, we don’t have a mirror with us all the time (although you probably do have a phone with you all the time), and it’s not very practical to stare at your reflection all day, but that’s the importance of remembering to be face-to-face with yourself from time to time.
Perhaps we should use that mirror to take a look at the World around us too, and our position within it. Such beauty is to be found in staring up at the night sky, to count the stars, to think about how many there are, how big they are, how far…
All to remind ourselves of a more objective view of our position in the universe, because as humans, we are all biased.
Every time I read a story book as a child, I imagined myself as the main character; and as we trek through life, we believe we are the main actor in that story too.
In a way, we are much like stars, shinning bright in the centre of our own system, often oblivious to the billions of other stars in our galaxy. We long for attention, sending out solar flares to reinstate our existence, pulling planets into our orbit, not the other way around. However, even without these planets, we create our own flames, give ourselves the motivation to keep on shinning; just remember: shine bright, don’t burn out.
This is probably a delusion, but it’s also a great blessing. Many say that humans are distinguished because of our ego. Perhaps it is this ego which allows us to block out the constant noise of the universe trying to hold us back and focus on the things driving us forward, to keep on going, to keep on striving for our goals.
Ego itself is not a bad thing, it allows us to discover who we are, ego only becomes a problem when it gets too big, then we see ourselves as bigger than we truly are; then we become Narcissist, obsessed with an image of himself until the time of his demise (another reason to not stare at your phone camera for too long).
Thus, our view of the World should not blind us from the impact we have made on it.
The World is not as gloomy as it looks; we shine brighter than we think we do. However we believe life seems, we are wrong. If life was just as it seems, what fun would that be?
