Post by Adesanya Ayotola (@adesanya_ayotola)

THE HALL OF MIRRORS

A man entered a hall of mirrors searching for himself, at first he was delighted. One mirror made him taller, another broader another brighter than he truly was.
He smiled at these reflections and called them ambition.

Then he found mirrors that made him smaller, weaker, less beautiful than the faces beside him. He frowned at these reflections and called them reality. So he spent his days walking from mirror to mirror, measuring, comparing, judging.

When he felt large, he looked down on others. When he felt small, he envied them. Yet every mirror, whether flattering or cruel, shared the same deception: None revealed who he was.

Outside the hall, a garden waited. The oak was not trying to become a rose. The river was not ashamed that it could not stand like a mountain. The stars did not compete for a place in the dawn. Each thing carried its purpose without consulting another but the man remained inside, holding a ruler against reflections.

Years passed.

One day, exhausted by comparison, he dropped the ruler. The sound echoed through the hall. A crack appeared in the nearest mirror. Then another and another. Until fragments of borrowed identities covered the floor. For the first time, he saw beyond the mirrors.

There was a window and through it, the world.
The trees had grown. The river still flowed. The mountains remained. The stars kept watch.
None had become another, yet all had become fully themselves. The man stepped outside. The wind asked no questions. The earth demanded no measurements and there, beneath a sky too vast for comparison, he discovered a truth hidden from him all along:

Pride and envy are twins born from the same mirror.
One says, "I am greater than you." The other says, "You are greater than me" but both forget that a mirror can only compare reflections. It cannot reveal purpose and the tragedy of many lives is not that they were too small but that they spent so much time studying other people’s reflections that they never learned the shape of their own soul.

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