By Gonny 
Yesterday, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I mean, I look in the mirror every single day, but this time I really looked. I saw the face of an aging woman looking back at me, a face that has been navigating this world for over seven decades.
And you know what my very first reaction was? I chuckled.
Usually, when I look in the mirror, my inner manager immediately goes to work. I check if my hair looks okay, I inspect a new wrinkle, and I completely buy into the story the glass is telling me: This is me. I am this body.
But in that brief moment, the curtain just slid open. I wasn’t looking AS the character; I was looking AT the character. It was like observing a trusty, familiar little space suit I’ve been wearing for a lifetime.
The awareness that was chuckling at the reflection felt completely timeless, weightless, and entirely untouched by age.
Back in the living room, sitting on the couch, I stopped relying on my memory of what I look like, and only paid attention to what I was actually experiencing right in that moment. If I don’t look in a mirror, and I don’t think about how others see me… what is actually there?
Looking down, I could see my lap, my arms, and my clothes. But when I looked straight ahead, I realized I saw no face. There are no borders, no heavy skull, and no tiny person sitting in a dark control room behind a pair of eyes. Right where I always assumed my head was, there was just…nothing.
But it isn’t an empty, dark nothing. It is a completely clear, awake, and open window.
In my own direct, raw experience, I am not a tiny person trapped inside a skull looking out at the world. I am just a wide-open, silent capacity that the whole room simply appears inside of. The couch, the light from the window, the sounds of the house…they are all happening within this quiet, boundless space that I am. I am the invisible capacity for the world to happen.
It was a most profound, liberating feeling. I was floating in this beautiful, boundless peace, feeling completely formless and entirely free… and then suddenly my partner yelled from the kitchen: “Hey, are we out of coffee?!”
Bam.
I was instantly pulled back into gravity, back into the human costume, back into being a person who needs to buy groceries. It is the ultimate cosmic joke of our daily lives.
We spend so much heavy effort trying to fix, manage, and worry about the character in the mirror. But what if, just for a moment today, you let the character take a break? What if you took a breath, stepped back into that quiet, wide-open space right behind your eyes, and just enjoyed the view?
You might just catch yourself chuckling, too.
With love and light,
G.