Where does the reflection end?

Are you what you want to be or a reflection of your desired self?

It is so incredibly easy now in a society with social networking, in which you can create a representation of yourself that isn't accurate in relation to your life, to lie about who you are. What happens even more prevalent I believe, is a sort or reality distortion field in which you create a vision of who you wish to be, who you hope to be and then slowly begin to believe it yourself without actually pursuing that desired self. You can take thousands of photos of yourself, edit them to perfection and select those for others to see as representations of your appearance. You can take quotes, ideas and slogans from others and "post" them, acting as if those deep thoughts were birthed from your mind alone. You can show all the highlights and excitement from your life and exclude all the mistakes and dull days, creating a vision of a dynamic and exciting self. You can totally alter the perception that others have of yourself, creating different first impressions, shifting opinions and changing judgement, all based on who you desire to be but not who you really are.

When you get sucked too far into this however, picking and choosing exactly what others see, creating an alternate "perfect self", the drive to actually better yourself starts slipping away. Sitting on a river bank during the hours of the day, you can see reflections of the trees along the bank, upon the water. The reflections are wavy, blurred, ephemeral, not perfect representations of the tree, and if you trace the reflection to the shore, you can clearly see where the reflection ends and the trunk of the tree casting the reflection begins. This is how our selves, and our desired selves should be. To find truth in who we are and to better ourselves, we need to accept that we have yet to get where we want to go, that we are flawed but that some of those flaws can be corrected in time, that we are not the person we wish others would see. We are not perfect. We are the "solid tree" (an odd example, taking into account past blog entries, I know), in the realm of "being", and the reflection is what we hope to be someday, separate from us, but dependent on us entirely and it is our responsibility to reach for that reflection that we admire and better ourselves as people.

However, when night comes and the only light that guides us comes from the stars and moon, the distinction between the reflections on the river and the trees themselves disappear. They are a black mass of limbs, reaching and clawing, invisibly joined somewhere, but where one begins and the other ends, from a distance, is impossible to see. This is what many of us have turned into, an unenlightened half-truth, even unsure ourselves where our real selves end and our desired selves begin, forming all into one falsity that inspires complacency and further deception.

I sat upon the bank of the river last night, under overcast skies, trying to decipher where the river oak started and ended, realizing powerfully once again, that as Plato taught as his students walked enlightened from the cave, light is truth and truth should be the goal of all men.