When every experience mirrors your personality

Anil Dash’s first blog post back in July 1999 titled “A Minor Revelation” was a pretty profound and highlights something I think about almost daily:

The premise is that the things we experience in our daily lives are reflections of ourselves. Behaviours and traits we see in other people are perceptions of similar behaviours and traits we see in ourselves. When we see a person behaving in a way that infuriates us, the anger we feel about the other person is really anger at what we see in ourselves.

Becoming aware of this dynamic and how all our experiences are really personal mirrors is both a challenge to our perception of an objective reality and frustrating for our egos because awareness brings the realisation that all those things that annoy or please us about other people are things that annoy or please us about ourselves.

The one question I have is how we can improve our experience of our lives. I suspect the answer lies in the idea that when we look around at our world and all we see pleases us and fills us with contentment, then we have reached a point where we accept ourselves as we are and are content in ourselves. This doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing for all of us. A person you or I may regard as an nasty person may be content with that and, consequently, his experience of the world. The question is what your experience of your world would be if you were completely content with your self?

Photo credit: Mirrors by shareski, licensed CC BY-NC 2.0