the world is a mirror.

It’s winter, which means that I inevitably find myself watching the movies that I watch each holiday season.

Most recently, it’s been It’s a Wonderful Life (my mom’s favorite) and Christmas with the Kranks (my dad’s favorite).

The two movies are inherently quite different, but watching them in succession to each other made me realize that they share a very similar sentiment.

Our lives are deeply interconnected.

George Bailey was born a selfless man. So was Blair, Nora and Luther Krank’s daughter.

When both of those characters are in need (of $8,000 or of a Christmas Eve party), the entire community that they’ve influenced rallies to support them, no questions asked.

the collective is a mirror of the individual.

We are made of the same essence as everything in this world. None of us live in isolation. The way that we show up, the version of ourselves that we embody, is directly impacting the bigger picture of our world—our families, our relationships, our communities, our society.

Would those same communities rally around Luther or Mr. Potter in the same way that they did for Blair and George Bailey?

Absolutely not—because the two of them were holding up mirrors of selfishness and greed.

In gross over-simplification:If you are holding up a mirror of kindness and thoughtfulness, that’s what you will find in your community. If you are holding up a mirror of anxiety or anger, that’s what you will find in your community.

If it’s stormy inside, it’s going to be stormy outside.

Maybe mirrors aren’t your preferred metaphor. I also like to think of our world as one big ball of energy. The energy of the whole is only as healthy or as vibrant as each individual that’s inside of it.

Our planet and our systems are composed of the state of each of us in it.

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the character named Shug says, “I knew that if I cut a tree my arm would bleed.”

We are deeply interconnected. I wrote about our cosmic web of existence back in 2024, too.

We think that our individual lives don’t matter, but they matter deeply.

When George Bailey is granted the gift of seeing what the world would look like if he were never born, he learns just how far his ripple has extended.

This is true for all of us, we just don’t have our own guardian angel Clarence handy to show us.

The world is a mirror. It’s directly reflecting who We are (yes, capital W).

On a large scale: I’m not saying that if you “think positive” that the world will magically be a better place.

It’s not about thoughts. It’s about embodying the change that you want to see in the world. When you embody a new way of being, you’re influencing others to do the same. And the more people who are influenced, the bigger the change becomes. The more we demand reform, the more we elect and stand behind leaders who also embody those changes. And suddenly it’s not just a small thing, it’s a movement.

On a small scale: I’m also not saying that with the right attitude, you’ll never face problems or grief or heartache again.

But, as we change the way we show up to adversity, our suffering within adversity can soften. It’s not about erasing those things, it’s about growing through them instead of bypassing them or ignoring them or stuffing them down.

The trees make up the forest.

As we all root and express ourselves more firmly, the forest will slowly begin to change.

And this is how we create a better world for ourselves now (small scale).

And it’s how we create a better world for years to come (bigger scale).

what mirror are you holding up to the world?

xx,

Court.