reflection

Personal essay writing that incites the mind and instigates personal growth involves examination and re-examination, a process of noticing and reflecting upon what a person perceives. Essayistic writing is an osmotic process wherein a person intuitively absorbs information and ideas, allows inchoate thoughts to gestate in the unconscious mind, and then consciously places the emergent strands of language and logic into an orderly and expressive format.

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

Confidence don't mean jack shit in the real world, sis," she once said. I feel myself finding the courage to trust those words more and more with every twist of the knife. Coincidentally, last Tuesday afternoon I was involuntarily exposed to the punch line of an old wise tale that goes something like: "There's beauty that can be found in everything." But why can't the insensitive cunt who said that ever find the courage to look in the mirror? Because poopycock, one might say.

So easy to go sailing off this road. A wonder more folks didn't. All that space, waiting.

There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

Naturally__nd why should I not admit this__ have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run.... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision...I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened. But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently...? And perhaps__ccurring as it did around the same time as these events?

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow.

There was no use wondering about the past.

Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.

No matter how small you are or feel or think you are__ive big. Yours is the only life of you, in this form, the world will ever have!

I have only been a __oor Me_ once or twice in my life_. And that was my own fault.

The only real conflict you will ever have in your life won__ be with others, but with yourself.

Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one's midlife crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on will alone. This comforting illusion may be shattered by some urgent irreversible experience ... None more potently confronts us with finiteness and contingency than the imminence of our own death.

the abyss you stare into and that stares back at you is your reflection in the mirror - we all have it - that shadow self - that dark heart...

The hardest thing of all, is just standing in front of a mirror and not recognizing the reflection.

By gazing inward the true reflection of the self is revealed.

The worst battle you'll have to fight is between what you know and how you feel.