A dialogue with a mirror

One fine morning, standing before the mirror, preparing to shave my straggly beard, a sudden thought struck me. "Mirror, Mirror , what do you see ?", I asked. "I see you", answered the mirror. "What do you see in me?", I insisted. The mirror stared at me silently for a long moment and then said - 

" I see an overgrown teenaged boy before me. With protruding ribs and varicose veins he dreams of becoming Bruce Lee someday - however he is too lazy to work for it. A vastly overconfident impertinent fool who admires his own intelligence, knowledge and modesty - what an irony (he is proud of being modest!)- nothing short of a narcissist, I would say, stands before me asking my opinion, hoping to hear me praise him. A selfish fool - that is what I would call you ..."

"Stop! Stop! I may be a fool but I am not selfish...", I protested and saying so, started to recount  a few acts which I believed showed my kindness. "You deceive yourself", smirked the mirror."Put a hand on your heart and then tell me - were those acts really selfless - or were they simply to escape the qualms that you would have inevitably felt later, had you not acted the way you did then - weren't they just an way of placating your dissatisfied conscience?"

I stopped to think - yes, the mirror was probably right. Those acts of kindness were indeed motivated by my desire to satisfy my own conscience - so in a way, the people I thought I was being kind to were in fact being kind to me by accepting my kindness. The mirror seemed to read my thoughts and continued - " And you expected gratitude from those people !" True enough - I was really at fault- a small word of thanks would have satisfied me perhaps , but then why should I expect even that ?

How hard it is for ordinary men like me to do something completely selflessly ,I thought, without any incentive whatsoever. Doing your duty without expecting any fruit of your toil is what the sacred 'Bhagavat Gita' advises us to do. That is certainly the ideal, but is it really achievable, I wondered. Maybe Yudhisthir could achieve that - but I am a mere mortal - it is certainly impossible for me.

I was pondering thus when the mirror again broke into my thoughts -" If you consider yourself 'a mere mortal', you will remain 'a mere mortal' forever" . "It is so thoughtful of you", I sneered."Minutes earlier you were condemning me for admiring myself, calling me a narcissist , and now you are urging me to think highly of myself again ? I do not understand it at all " The mirror softened. It said " Think deeply, and you will realise - I condemned you because you admired in yourself qualities you never had - you were living in an utopian world in which you were the best , too lazy to strive towards being so in the real world. What I am urging you to do now is to try to inculcate those qualities in yourself - truly, this time. To take up such a challenge itself needs great courage and confidence." The mirror smiled and added " Since you were always overconfident, I guess you would have enough of the latter..." 

The mirror winked, and I was shaken out of my reverie. Staring at myself in the mirror, I promised myself - "I will try".