The Cracked Mirror

There was once a young seeker who carried a mirror everywhere he went.

It was small, polished, and perfectly smooth — a gift from a teacher who told him,
“In this, you will see the truth.”

The seeker believed the teacher, because the teacher spoke with confidence and wore robes that suggested certainty.

So each morning, the seeker lifted the mirror and asked it the same question:

“Who am I meant to be?”

And the mirror always answered with the same reflection:
a neat, composed version of himself — the one the world found acceptable.

For a time, this was comforting.

But one day, while walking through the noise of the city, the seeker slipped.
The mirror fell, struck the concrete, and cracked into a spiderweb of shining fractures.

Horrified, he knelt to gather the pieces.

A stranger passing by said, “It’s ruined. Throw it out.”
Another said, “I know a shop that sells perfect mirrors. You should buy one.”
A third said, “Listen to me — I have a mirror that has never lied. Follow me and see.”

But the seeker did not move.

Instead, he lifted a fragment of the broken mirror and saw something he had never seen before:

His reflection was distorted, multiplied, shifting —
yet somehow more honest than the perfect face he’d known.

He saw not just who he thought he was,
but everything he had ignored:
his desires, his fear, the ache beneath his ambition,
and a quiet courage he had never recognized.

A strange peace filled him.

The truth, he realized, was not a single clean image.
It was the living shimmer inside every shard.

So he gathered the pieces, not to restore the old mirror,
but to build a new one — one shaped by his own hands,
one that could hold both clarity and fracture.

And from that day forward, he asked his reflection a different question:

“What truth is mine today?”

And the mirror always answered,
not with certainty,
but with honesty.