Looking in the mirror

25th birthday edition

I turned 25 today.

As I do most days, I walked into the bathroom, made some funny faces in the mirror, and then took a long hard look at myself.

I never look any different than I did the night before. I never feel much different either.

I suppose that’s the thing about change. It usually happens far too slowly to be noticeable. But day by day, year by year, decade by decade, things most certainly change.

There’s no denying that I look quite a bit different today than I did 10 years ago. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two along the way as well. But as I walked into the bathroom today, for the first time finding myself closer to age 40 than to age 10, I couldn’t help but feel like for the majority of my life, I had been looking in the wrong mirror.

Over the course of the last few years, I’ve become far less interested in the physical aspects of my evolution and far more interested in the emotional, intellectual, and (dare I say) spiritual aspects.

I still don’t exactly know how I would define “spiritual evolution.” I do know however that I have increasingly found myself caring less about what other people think of me and more about what other people think of themselves.

Maybe I’m evolving spiritually. Maybe I’m a recovering narcissist. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Naming conventions aside, I’ve often struggled to document the non-physical facets of my personal evolution, while finding it frustratingly easy to document the physical ones. I can pull up any old picture and see, quite clearly, how my appearance has changed over the decades. That exercise is however far more entertaining than it is interesting.

Over the course of the last few years, when I haven’t been busy making funny faces in the mirror, I’ve spent a lot of time reading. In aggregate, I’ve read hundreds of thousands of sentences across all sorts of media—books, tweets, articles, work emails, iMessages, Amazon reviews, you name it.

Now, I don’t mean to sound dramatic (and I definitely don’t mean to offend any colleagues or fellow Amazon reviewers), but of all of those sentences, there is one that has stood out above the rest. One that has secured the title of “most important sentence I have read in a long time.”

It goes like this.

Books are like mirrors, you only see in them what you already have inside you.

I can’t explain why I am so taken with this sentence until I explain why seven-year-olds shouldn’t read Shakespeare…so here goes.

To be fair, there are probably a lot of reasons why seven-year-olds shouldn’t read Shakespeare. Most people would probably tell you the main reason is that seven-year-olds’ reading comprehension abilities aren’t advanced enough to comprehend the prose. Unfortunately, that’s not that interesting of an answer.

If you asked me why seven-year-olds shouldn’t read Shakespeare, I would tell you it’s because they haven’t had enough life experiences (nor have they developed the faculty to integrate their life experiences in a way that is novel, narrative, and/or unique), for Shakespeare’s poetry or plays to mean anything to them.

Most seven-year-olds have never experienced love, loss, regret, or betrayal. And it is precisely because of this lack of life experience that if you were to hold up one of Shakespeare’s plays in front of them, the metaphorical mirror would not reflect a whole lot of anything.

So what do seven-year-olds and Shakespeare have to do with my expedition to understand the wonderfully mysterious process of becoming myself?

Without mirrors or photographs, I would struggle to take stock of the evolution of my physical features—my outer self.

Without art, I would struggle to take stock of the evolution of the knowledge, lessons, and emotional faculties I have managed to accrue and hone over the years—my inner self.

Not only do books, movies, songs, plays, poems, and essays allow me to get a sense of where and who I am, they also allow me to get a sense of where and who I’ve been. Every time I read, watch, or listen to quality art for the second, third, or tenth time, it seems to change. And if perception is the product of object and observation, a change in perception implies a change in observer—an evolution of self.

I have come to the realization that, by and large, I don’t know that I know many of the things that I know. So as I have more experiences and begin to know more of life, I have increasingly begun looking to authors, screenwriters, musicians, and directors to tell me through their craft what I didn’t know that I knew.

Accumulating experience is the precursor for personal evolution, but is not personal evolution itself. Experience serves as the basis for reflection. The highest-quality art then serves as the highest-resolution mirrors—providing the reflections upon which real transformation might occur.

Watching Good Will Hunting this weekend will allow me to internalize many of the lessons I have (inadvertently) managed to accumulate over the past several years. Furthermore, watching it every year on my birthday will allow me to document my personal evolution from year to year. My reactions, thoughts, takeaways, and reflections each time I watch Good Will Hunting will serve as still-frames of my current emotional, intellectual, and spiritual self.

In 10 years, not only will I be able to look back on a photograph of myself from 6th grade and laugh at the gap between my teeth, so too will I be able to look back on my notes from watching Good Will Hunting on my 25th birthday and laugh at the gap between the person I was and the person I was soon to become.

I hope to genuinely be amused by the prior year’s version of myself each time another birthday rolls around. Anything short of that would be a failure, for as a good friend likes to remind me often—if you’re not embarrassed by the version of yourself from a year ago, you’re not moving fast enough.

As with most things, this is easier said than done. I know I will never be polished if I am irritated by every rub, yet I often find myself frustrated by trivial matters. I know smooth seas never made a good sailor, yet I often find myself straying towards calmer waters—the path of least resistance. Each shortcoming is not only a reminder that I still have much to learn, but also a valuable opportunity to do so.

Randy Pausch once said that experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And what are we but stunningly fragile and complex bundles of experience?

I hope to continue to accumulate experience, not because there is anything inherently valiant in doing so, but because doing so is the only chance I have to truly grow. It is the only chance I have to shed my layers of mediocrity, in hopes of revealing slightly more sophisticated and less mediocre layers of myself. I hope to repeat this process over and over, and to one day look back and see it as the journey (or the dance) that has been my life.

Whether life is a journey or a dance is still not completely clear to me. I find myself leaning towards dance these days, but ask me again on my 26th birthday.

Until then, I hope you are able to find the mirrors that shed light on the aspects of yourself you wish to explore and understand more deeply.

As for me, I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.