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I have a friend who, as part of her search for enlightenment and spiritual consciousness, went through a six-month-long period during which her meditation consisted of looking at herself in the mirror for thirty minutes each day. She said it was a powerful meditation.
Monkey-see, monkey-do. I decided to try this technique. Well, the first problem was finding a mirror to look in. Most of my mirrors are five feet off the floor and are too heavy to take down and replace every day. There are the sliding mirrored doors on the coat closet, but in order to use them I'd have to sit in the drafty hallway.
You get the picture. I obviously didn't really want to do this mirror thing. I doubted that any of its benefits would be worth the pain of staring at myself in the mirror for thirty minutes every morning.
About ten years ago I looked in the mirror and I saw my sister Sari. I was shocked. We have never looked alike. She's taller. Bigger-boned. Looks more like our mother. Has darker hair. I'm shorter, look like my father's sister (Aunt Roberta) and her son (Cousin Bob). But there I was, a dead ringer for Sari. And over the ten years since, I've grown to resemble her more and more. Now we're like the Bobbsey twins.
(There's a New Yorker cartoon that shows two old women sitting on a park bench. Each is wearing a buttoned-up winter coat and a little-old-lady hat. They are obviously sisters. One says to the other: "Are you the smart one and I'm the pretty one, or is it the other way around?")
Is this all I have to say about mirrors? Little jokes and anecdotes? A history of mirrors was published a few years ago. Ever since we first saw ourselves in a still pool, we have been fascinated with our appearance. Do you remember the first time you saw yourself in a three-way-mirror? You hadn't known what you looked like from the side. Sometimes it's better not to know.
Our sweet Baby Sam, when he was just a year old, loved his mirror image. This was discovered by accident one day when he was having a bad day, fussing and crying and apparently inconsolable over some unknown baby angst. A desperate parent carried him to the mirror and said, "Look, Sam! See the baby?"
Well, Sam saw. He stopped crying and began smiling and laughing. He babbled greetings and sent coy looks to the little stranger. For months the mirror was Sam's parents' best friend.
The mirror was a sure-fire distraction. Before he was mobile, you could hold him up close to the mirror and he would put his hands on the glass and give the baby a big wet kiss. Even at a sophisticated twelve months, he played with the baby in the mirror, toddling to the full-length mirror in his bedroom, picking up his favorite soft monkey or big plush dog, burying his face in the animal, and then peeking shyly at the mirror to see what the other baby thinks of him.
When I was visiting in the
All bird-ly duties were forgotten in his obsession. He hopped from front to back, back to front, front to back, sure that if he could just be fast enough he would find that sneaky hiding bird. He did not eat, he did not go home to see his wife and baby birdies. He dug not a single worm.
How did he excuse himself when he arrived at the nest after dark? Did he say, "Honey, I'm sorry I didn't call, but you wouldn't believe how I spent the day! There's a stranger in the neighborhood, and I spent the whole day playing hide-and-seek with him. And I never managed to catch him!"
And did she believe him?
We watched this off and on all day, but, lacking the bird's obsession, we also ate and played with babies and walked to the beach at
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