To See One’s Self

The very name, Henry David Thoreau, elicits a fine sense of nostalgia within me. Not only do I enjoy his thoughts, but also his writing skills. He said something to the effect that there is only one right word that makes a sentence work.

In the quote below, the word ‘hard’ does not quite work for me. Perhaps ‘elusive’ would be a better choice.

Life is a house of mirrors within a labyrinth of caverns and mazes. Reflections of truth, echoes of truth… all inverting, convoluting and permuting one’s perceptions of truth and Self.

A jacket, turned inside out, still looks and acts very much the same. Life affords a limitless number of inside out, upside down, inverted reflections of itself, each consistent within its own self, loaded with more than ample ammunition to overshadow the true Self.

When the Self is finally seen it says nothing, yet everything within that silence. It never goes away and lands with an all-consuming punch.

Only then can the awesome beauty of its overt, yet elusive, omnipresence be consumed. And this at the price of the viewer’s own dissolution into something so far-reaching and grand as to overwhelm all that was, while evading any possibility or inclination of being grasped.

‘Hard’ is not the word I would choose. Hard is living a life lost to the permutations and convolutions… and trying to view the Self by holding on to those echoes.

The awakening is not hard at all. Nothing could be easier. It just simply, suddenly, unexpectedly, shockingly, quietly… happens.

“It is as hard to see one’s self as to look backwards without turning around.”

– Henry David Thoreau, US Transcendentalist author