The other day I replaced an old, cracked mirror in my bathroom. When I took the existing one down, suddenly the room seemed to lose half its size. Turns out it’s just a claustrophobic little room with a toilet, sink, and tub.
The sense that there’s open space in front of me while I brush my teeth is an illusion, but that illusion is much more familiar to me than the reality. In other words, my mirror-skewed impression of the room – the way it seems – feels more real and is more relevant to my life than the room’s actual properties.
The new mirror opened it up spatially again, and removed a bit of dinge and disorder from the view. This even made me seem better — I feel like a slightly more dignified person looking into an immaculate mirror than a damaged one.
The way things seem matters a lot, perhaps more than the way they actually are. You get a hint of this whenever you dress up in good clothes. Even if nobody else is around, you probably feel more capable and more formidable. Sharp attire can change, at least for the moment, who you seem to be, even though the being beneath the clothes shouldn’t be changed by draping new things on it.
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