28/05/2026
JOURNAL | a blog with Timmy
When the Mirror doesn’t reflect your world
One morning when I was in Toronto I witnessed something that stayed with me long after I walked away.
In a quiet courtyard I noticed what I thought was a small statue of a bird sitting beside a mirror in the front yard of a home. It looked perfectly still, almost too perfectly still, which is why I lifted my phone to take a photo.
And then it moved.
What I had thought was a statue was actually a living bird standing in front of the mirror, staring intently at its own reflection.
At first it seemed curious. But then it began doing something that quickly became unsettling.
The bird kept jumping toward the mirror, hitting it again and again as if trying to enter another world that existed on the other side of the glass.
Each time it would pull back, pause, and then try again.
When I walked around the side to see if I could encourage it to move away, it simply jumped from one mirror to another.
Mirror to mirror.
Even when it flew to a nearby step, it returned again to the reflection, still trying to enter a space that did not exist.
Watching it felt strangely confronting, because suddenly I realised how familiar this behaviour is for us as people.
How often do we spend our energy trying to enter a reality that is only a reflection?
We chase something that appears real from the outside.
An image;
an idea of success;
approval, belonging, validation;
believing that if we just reach it, something will open for us on the other side. But there is no world on the other side of the mirror.
Only ourselves.
Standing there watching that bird, I felt something shift inside me.
I recognised that in many ways I too have been doing this in my own life trying to reach through reflections instead of simply turning and stepping fully into the real world around me.
