I was noticing on the walk to my office from my local haunt of morning caffeine what became my contemplation for the day.  Because I had my umbrella raised against the constant rain I was kind of looking down as I walked.  I noticed the incredible things that were going on in the reflections on the water that had fallen on the street.  The little twinkle lights from the trees, the stoplights, the passing car lights.  As I thought about it occurred to me that everything we see is actually a reflection; reflected light, that’s how our eyes work.

I also thought about this in the context of architecture and the period in the 70’s and 80’s where everything was being built with reflective glass.  Office buildings of that era for example seem to all have that in common. I wondered how much of that might have to do with a lack of identity and the desire to reflect what’s around us rather than take the more challenging road toward something unique and individual.

Reflection, of course, also means to reflect back on something, to remember it.  I got going on that a bit too and wondered if I do that more than others or about the same.  I’m guessing more than others.  That brought me around to thinking about an FBI handwriting expert I met around the pool in Florida when I was ten years old – I remember that her last name was Hooten.  She noticed that my dad’s handwriting has a backward rather than forward lean which indicates the person is “reflecting back to the past” or in a way living in the past.  I always wondered what it was in his past that he seemed so attached to.  If indeed, like Groucho Marx said, “nostalgia is a mild form of depression” then he needed a strong dose of Prozac for he was a very nostalgic man.

He had a favorite phrase that he got from his mom, he would always say it in Greek but the loose translation is “gone are the days of my youth and childhood”.  Seems sad.  While it’s true, it seems to me the better outlook is that there’s this road ahead of me, I can’t see the end anywhere in sight and today’s part of the path reveals some very beautiful reflections, in all meanings of the word.  And that the reflections are indeed the real thing, real life.

So that was today’s somewhat simple contemplation.  I’ve started writing them down again.  Perhaps someday I will compile them into some sort of volume.  Maybe I can call it “mind salad” or something and sell it exclusively in mental wards and to institutionalized people like those in Baptist schools or boy’s prisons, y’know a loyal but deeply disturbed following.

By Clay Konnor