Infinite Mirrors

The universe is basically a very dramatic mirror. What you see depends entirely on the angle you’re holding your life at, the filter on your mood, and whether you’ve slept enough. History repeats itself – especially if you haven’t done your homework – and sometimes the echoes are so literal they feel like bad rewrites of a play you thought you’d left backstage.

Case study: dogs.

My grandparents had a husky. I named her Happy because, if you’re going to rescue something, you might as well give it optimism as a name. She arrived like an accident of fate, not a purchase. Later we had a tan hunting dog who refused to leave us that we had no other choice but to take him in. One Christmas, Happy nearly died. I was a teen, and in that small, ridiculous human way, I used my Christmas wish on her healing. Months of illness turned to recovery, and she got a third chance at life; rescued off the street, loved, and then loved again.

Fast-forward years. Another husky rescue; Alex. He already had a name. Another tan hunting dog that successfully got himself adopted because he refused to leave. Alex got attacked. Untreated wounds became infection; he fell ill. It stopped being coincidence and started to look like a pattern; a repeating riff on a melody I recognized but had no sheet music for.

At my parents’ place, another rescue who found us by herself, injured a leg during the same patch I was limping. This March, apparently, was Injury Season. Or perhaps it’s simply that the world hums in patterns, and sometimes the hum reaches everyone within earshot.

Look at the weather. Stormy weeks mirror stormy moods. Clear nights feel like reconciliations with life. Stars pop on like tiny agreement notices, saying, Yes. You are still part of this. Nature mirrors our bodies, our feelings, our odd little crises. We borrow metaphors from it because evolution handed us the original instruction manual: watch a river and you’ll understand flow; watch a tree and you’ll learn rootedness.

We are connected: not in a platitudey, inspirational-poster way, but in a slow, undeniable choreography of cause and echo. If you stop for even a minute, and you start noticing, you’ll find more mirrors than you have in your bathroom cabinet.

Sometimes the reflections are gentle: a breeze on a balcony that makes you remember lying on your childhood roof naming cloud animals (fox! swan! very questionable whale). Sometimes they are cinematic: you feel like you’re watching your life from a balcony above it: a passive observer in a movie you wrote but forgot your lines for. Those dreamlike moments are not glitches. They’re the universe handing you a high-def still of the pattern: pause, study, understand.

There are people who minimize mirrors in their life (metaphorically and literally, some of them hate selfies). I get it. Maybe mirrors are inconvenient if you’re not ready to adjust your hair or your narrative. But pretending mirrors aren’t there doesn’t stop the reflection. It just postpones the conversation.

So what if we accepted that we come from invisible roots above and below that tie us to the soil, the stars, and everything in between? What if the planet is one enormous organism and we’re polite bacteria? (Philosophy aside: I like the imagery.) If we stop treating daily life like a to-do list and start reading it like a novel, there’s more meaning than we usually allow ourselves to see between the lines.

The point isn’t mystical showboating. It’s noticing: the feather on your path; the way a dog’s eye holds you and remembers you months later; the way your limp matches other people’s (and your parents’ dog’s that lives 1’500km away) ; the way a chance conversation solves a problem you didn’t know you had. These are small miracles disguised as coincidences.

So maybe the work is simple and impossible at the same time: observe more, judge less, and loosen your grip on the wheel. Float a little. Let life look back at you. If dreams have been whispering the script all along, perhaps reality is only waiting for you to show up and read it.

And if you’re still unsure. Try the dog test. Rescue one, watch how history and heartbeat rearrange themselves, and then tell me the universe isn’t excellent at mirrors.