Life is Like An Echo

A little boy came running excitedly to his mother saying: "Mom, there is a boy out there in the woods who is mocking me. Everything I say he says after me. If I say: "Hello," he says: "Hello." When I say "Who are you?" he says: "Who are you?" "So I got mad and jumped over the fence and went into the woods to find him. But he wasn't anywhere. So I yelled, "I'll punch you in the nose." And he said the very same thing, exactly as I had said it." The boy's mother told him, "That is only an echo answering you Billy. If you had said: 'I love you,' it would have said the same to you." There is a similar story about a dog who went into a room full of mirrors. He eventually died of exhaustion trying to fight his mirrored 'enemies.' If he had only wagged his tail once, he would have had all of them wagging their tails in friendship.


Life is like an echo or a mirror: we get out of it what we put in.