Different nightmares converged as I looked out the window.

There was thick black smoke in front of me. Everywhere looked hazy and foggy. The scene was chaotic. People screamed. Adults panicked. Children cried and ran in ways that suggested they wanted either their mommy or daddy.

I couldn’t stand the scene, so I looked left. I saw a colleague. He told me he was sad about the state of the world. “It’s depressing” he said. To deal with what’s going on, he mediates to cool his mind. I didn’t stay long with this friend because meditation was not my thing anymore. I wished him well and looked to the right.

To my right was a crowd. An endless crowd. I have never seen that many people before. It was striking that they were all looking ahead. They were looking at something. I ran to get my eyeglasses so I could see properly.

Suddenly, I noticed that they were staring at their reflections in mirrors positioned in front of them. It looked like no one paid me any attention.

I stood beside a man and saw what he was looking at. There were different scenes in his mirror. I saw his younger version. He was committing unspeakable and despicable acts. He looked sad and regretful. But neither sadness nor regret could change anything he did.

I looked ahead and saw a mirror with no one standing in front of it. It was weird. I moved closer and as I did, I realized why.

The mirror was mine.

 I saw acts and scenes I didn’t remember or had chosen to forget. I saw things I did. Things I wasn’t proud of. Like the one time I yelled and cursed at a lady simply because I didn’t get what I wanted. It felt and reeked of entitlement or rather, self-entitlement.

As the scenes became intense, I ran back in, locked the door and went to the window to see if I could look only to realize that everything was gone.

My street was just the way it was and used to be.  There was no black smoke in front. Neither was my colleague on the left nor the endless crowd on the right. I wondered what happened but amidst everything, the one thing that sat with me was: self – entitlement.

Why?

Why did my mirror reflect that concept?

It’s funny because I’ve been thinking about self-entitlement lately. It is a word, or maybe two, that disguises selfishness as self-interest.

Just recently, I sat and asked myself why the world is how it is.

Why do we have protectionism? Why does capitalism exist? Why do people harm others? Why and how do people get so brave to an extent to unalive another human?

Lately, my whatsapp status has been reeking of people who have gone missing and abducted in parts of the globe on the condition that they would only be released for a hefty sum.

These people are men, women, husbands, sons, daughters, grandfathers and mothers, grandmothers and fathers, cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunties and whatever it is they are.

So how exactly did we get here?

How did we get to a point where we stop being our neighbor’s keeper?

I sat with this thought and landed on one truth.

It’s because our mirrors became so blurry that we really stopped seeing what our true reflections looked like.