Note
Mibae (Pronunciation Me-Ba-A) a Japanese word
Meaning: (Noun) Vanity, Appearance, Attractiveness, Appeal, and Attraction
What a great surprise that we must learn to embrace the constant fierce flux to stay grounded on this ever-spinning globe! How do we love something—our body and mind—that constantly needs to be elsewhere and invariably changes with the earth’s rotation every moment?
Our heartbreaks, too, often lead us on a journey of transformation—a flight from the pain. Unknowingly, we move towards pain in our imaginations, hopes, and dreams. When we, the earthlings, return to the bruises along with her rotations, we mistook the authority of these injuries. They reshape our future. A journey with scars is a one-way street. We don’t return to the same state as the person we were. We become another being. So, we long and yarn for a magical erasure of all illness and misfortune to heal wounds, mend brokenness, undo wrong, and serve justice.
Day in and day out, everything seems unchanged—an allure to an illusion we fancy believing, but otherwise. Look no further than yesterday’s self, and you will meet the stranger in the mirror of today! When moving with the earth’s rotation, we don’t realize how we return to or have become. As it were, we become strangers to our own senses. In fear of losing touch with reality, our mind instantly creates narratives and fascinates us with seductive feelings of control over destiny. Our cataract vision sees silhouettes of shapes and colors of faded liveliness. As the brain sees, not the eyes, it grapples while drowning in “Mibae.” The vanity of a false sense of security becomes a reality! No alarm goes off in our minds to warn us that everything is adrift. We continue our sleepwalking. Moments become yesteryear, forever swallowing our entire being. An urgency to converse with the person we have been accompanying all along eludes attention while we repeatedly hear a ping from the back of our minds. Desperately, we avoid ourselves in the mirror and in the eye. Our greatest fear is the knowledge we already possess about our circumstances, but we are hesitant or hopeful about accepting them. And only accidentally discover how we—the shadow me and the sunlight me—both aged, even though we have been inseparable during our journey.
We can only run so much in this fleeting life! Some of us are lucky enough to have the long-awaited conversation with ourselves. Do we feel blessed to meet the person we hoped to be? Or do we rush away—again—from the self we dread?