Seeing Our Reflection

 William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the 1848 novel, Vanity Fair, once wrote, "The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face."

I think that what he meant by this is that what we see depends on how we look at the world. And that how we act may influence how the world responds to us. It's the old "glass half full or glass half empty" effect.

I'm not saying that the world is a wonderful, perfect place (although parts of it surely are), nor that we should ignore all the bad things happening to our neighbour (in the broadest sense of that term). On the contrary, when we see living beings in distress, it is our duty to reach out and do what we can. 

Each of us is a complex human being, whose life has been shaped by all our experiences leading up to this moment. And I believe that how we have responded to these experiences in the past will dictate how we respond to them now, how we will respond to them in the future. Of course, bad things happen to all of us, and it takes a good deal of resilience to bounce back from these, rather than being broken by them.

But I believe that our underlying attitude to life does have an effect on how well (or poorly) we respond to events in our lives and in the wider world. If we look at the world to see the best in it, then that is what we will see. If we focus on the unpleasant, sad, bad, that is what we will see. If we see the world as a harsh place and ourselves as victims, it will be more difficult for us to discern the beauty and good all around us.

Because there always *is* some beauty and good around us, no matter how harsh our circumstances. Victor Frankl, the Austrian Holocaust survivor, shared some precious wisdom about this:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitdue in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

"Between stimuls and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." How we see the world, how we see ourselves, will depend on the response we choose.