Shanhu Lee
Who is this ugly sad thing that I see in the mirror?
A head full of grey hair, and acne on the chin,
What a strange combination.
What’s happened to my mirror?
A head full of grey hair, and acne on the chin.
Is she 50? 60? Or 70?
What’s happened to my mirror?
Why does she even want to wear an N95 mask?
Is she 50? 60? Or 90?
Leave the mask to young and cheerful people.
Why does she want to wear a mask?
If I see her on the street, I would tell her:
Leave the mask to young and cheerful people.
This is the end of the world.
If I see her on the street, I would tell her:
You don’t belong to this beautiful country.
This is the end of the world.
Who cares about you working hard or not?
You don’t live in this beautiful house,
No one looks at you anymore.
Who cares about you working hard or not?
What a strange thing:
No one looks at you anymore,
This ugly, sad thing that I see in the mirror.
shanhu lee 
It’s easy to get caught up in unrelenting self conscious mental gymnastics over our appearance or our ability to relate to others. We question whether we are too old, too short, too heavy, too skinny, too gray, or whether our skin is not smooth enough, or maybe the wrong color, or some body parts are not big enough, or maybe too big. Or even that we are not witty enough, or not smart enough or maybe too intelligent, you know, not cool enough. Or, maybe it’s our hair, or lack of it. The list goes on and on.
In a Kafkaesque world, this would be for naught, for as much as would struggle to conform ourselves to an ideal we set out to emulate, all of our plans, the whole way in which we would have configured our own behavior, would fall to pieces, as we find ourselves against a force that does not lend itself to the way we perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance.
Yet, it really does come down to chance…a chance encounter, a chance communication, a chance event, a chance thought, a chance idea, a chance attitude, a chance glance. We can control the odds to a degree by the chances we take — the venues we attend, the groups we join, the trips we take, but it’s been my experience that we have to be open to the unexpected. Simply put, there have been countless times in my life where an outcome became the opposite of my strongly held expectation. That unexpectedness can be disquieting (just look at all the religions that try to order it), or it can be embraced. Most of us are somewhere in between.
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