"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing —
to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from —
my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing,
all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."


~C.S. Lewis




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Monday, January 23, 2012

Living in the mirror world


I have started to realize that so many elements of my life \ could be the stuff of books and movies. Not because they are terribly exciting, but because I see them as such. Isn’t that why we love movies and books? The stories thrill us and we long to be a part of them.

Yet ironically, often, those stories are so commonplace that if they happened to us in this life we wouldn’t even notice and would probably complain bitterly of our tedious existence. But when put in the screen of a movie or the pages of a book, suddenly to us they are transformed to fabulously epic tales, and we long to be a part of that world and live in those vast adventures. What changed? Not the story and not the world. Only our perspective of it.


Life is only as remarkable, enthralling, and exhilarating as your perspective.

It is rather like a mirror.

Have you ever stared into your bedroom mirror and looked at the reflection of your room within it? You know every dusty corner of that room; you see the rumpled bedspread and the old stuffed animal lying comatose on the shelf. And yet, when you look at that very commonplace, suffocatingly familiar room in the mirror, it seems so different, so exotic, somehow. It’s a world you long to be a part of, and you wonder what kind of adventures you might have if somehow you could simply step through that mirror into that other world, a world so like your own… and yet so different. Yet nothing changed in that world to make it a new and exciting land—nothing changed, that is, except your perspective.

I think life is a great deal like that. We can see it as the commonplace, everyday, rumpled-bedspread world that holds nothing and takes everything from us. Or, we can see it as the mirror-world, still with all of the same elements and all of the same details, but with an ethereal radiance that makes it the land of a storybook and a place of every adventure possible.

It’s all in your mirror.