This is a parable.
It’s a warning.
It’s a piece of advice.
It’s the truth.
I went to a store today that specializes in electronics. They sell anything related to everything you can plug in or charge or turn on and off and all of those electronic devices are becoming more and more complicated and pervasive. They surround you and enter into you and mount up higher and higher all the way to the ceiling where they stare back down at you, very similar to the ghosts and goblins you visualized in the dark as a kid, except now they all glow full of light and energy of the electric kind and the appearance of reality.
But it isn’t real.
Not really. Even if they call it the news, it isn’t what you know as the truth as you watch right there and then, the truth of who you are and what you are and what you know from everything that happened to you has nothing to do whatsoever with audio and video.
Look right here.
The biggest most noticeable objects in the sales area are big screen televisions. I mean big. Several feet tall and more feet wide and cost thousands of dollars. They don’t fit against a wall. They are the wall. Bigger than a picture window.
They are the window.
I don’t own one.
I’m grateful.
I wouldn’t own one.
I avoid them.
I ignore them.
In my home there are mirrors. Some are large and one of them has hung in all the homes I have known since boyhood. It is surrounded by a gold frame. My parents bought it. The mirror they bought and all the other mirrors require no electrical connection, no cable, no antenna, no batteries, no tuning. They do not depict life in any way but right here right now. Nothing but real. They are not theatrical or artificial. They do not require sponsorship by the corporation for public broadcasting or require any commercial interruption.
Mirrors reflect life.
Mine and yours.
The way you make it.
No one exactly the same.
They do not present it the way someone else produces it and delivers it to you through the air or in a cable.
Watch television or a screen of any size and live to watch it, stand, sit, walk, run, eat, ride or fly lost for hours at a time and days, weeks, months, years altogether wear it on your wrist and measure your life by seasons of your favorite show then organize your life around a program schedule and you have no life.
Not really.
You’ve become a spectator, a grandstand zero.
Look in the mirror.
Any mirror
They know this.
Mirrors tell the truth.
They watch and they wait for you to do something.
They want you to do something beside watch and wait.
Turn off the set.
Turn off the device.
Turn your back and walk away.
Even from the mirrors.
Leave the remote where you found it.
Leave the mirror hanging on the wall.
Everything you’ve ever seen on the network or the internet has already been seen by someone else.
You’re living a second hand life.
Only you know what you look like.
Open your eyes.
Better yet close them and take a good look at yourself.
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