mirror mirror…or not?

i spent a good amount of time last summer roughing it in the great outdoors. camping, hiking, boating, et cetera. while i was gallivanting around lakes and through creeks and up mountains, getting terribly dusty and sweaty and considerably disheveled and having a thoroughly fabulous time, i had a thought.

what if we lived in a world without mirrors?

really. think about it.

during my time spent away from proper civilization this summer, no mirrors followed me around. i didn’t have a chance to glance at my hair or makeup or clothes just by stepping into a bathroom.

i got dirty, my hair wasn’t perfectly straight, and my invisible blonde eyelashes were, well, pretty much invisible without a coating of that dark gloppy stuff we call mascara.

and i was totally okay with it. when i didn’t have the chance to look at myself every hour, i actually ended up caring less about how i looked.

the honest truth is that when most of us look in the mirror, we see the flaws. as bad as that is, it is so, so hard not so sometimes.

but what if we had never, ever seen those flaws before? and really, we only consider them flaws based on society’s definition of beauty. so what if we never had the chance to look at ourselves and determine if we had those “flaws” or not?

think of all the depression and the sadness and the self-consciousness that might have never even begun, had people not ever been able to look at themselves.

this summer, i was able to look on people with more love, and with a softer eye because i wasn’t inadvertently comparing my appearance to theirs. after not seeing yourself for even a few hours, i found out that you kind of start to forget the little tiny details of your face in your mind (as weird as that may sound). everything began to soften and blur in my mind until when i thought of my face, i only saw the smile, and the eyes, and the light.

the beauty is what is left behind as everything else fades.

but then you get back in front of a mirror, and the stark reality is staring back at you, and the comparison begins again. suddenly it is so painfully easy to pick out everything that society has told us is far from beautiful, and those nuances seem so painfully obvious.

but what if we didn’t have mirrors? 

there’s my hypothesizing for the day – what do you think?

—————————————————————————————————-

this post was inspired by the wordpress daily prompt! http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/daily-prompt-mirrored/