Barking at Our Own Reflections

Pedros Reflections

In the fading light of evening, my father’s dog stands alert in the yard, barking into the gathering dusk. A moment passes, and then the response comes—an echo bouncing off the nearby barn. The pattern is unmistakable: bark, pause, response, repeat. The dog, it seems, is engaged in an endless conversation with his own voice.

There’s something both comical and profound in this scene. Here is a creature, earnest and determined, barking at what is essentially his own reflection—not visual, but auditory. The barn serves as a mirror of sound, throwing back his calls in a distorted echo that he mistakes for another dog, a rival, a threat, or perhaps a friend. He cannot understand that he is the author of his own agitation.

Watching this nightly ritual, I find myself wondering: How often do we, as humans, bark at our own reflections?

The Echo of Our Actions

The ancient concept of karma suggests that our actions create ripples in the fabric of existence, returning to us in forms we may not immediately recognize. “What goes around comes around,” as the saying goes, though the mechanics of this return are rarely as simple as cause and effect in a physics textbook. The echoes are distorted, delayed, transformed by their journey through the complex terrain of human interaction.

Consider the last argument you had—really had, the kind that left you feeling righteously indignant or deeply frustrated. Strip away the surface details, the specific words and circumstances, and examine the underlying patterns. How often do our conflicts mirror our own behaviors, our own blind spots, our own unresolved tensions? We rail against in others what we cannot or will not see in ourselves.

The dog by the barn cannot step outside his immediate experience to recognize the echo for what it is. Similarly, we often cannot step outside the linear flow of time to see the connections between our past actions and present circumstances. We experience life moment by moment, cause followed by effect in neat sequence, but perhaps reality operates on a different temporal logic entirely.

Time as a Barn Wall

What if time isn’t the straight line we imagine it to be? What if it curves back on itself like sound waves bouncing off a barn wall? From this perspective, our past actions don’t simply fade into history—they ricochet through the complex architecture of human relationships and return to us, sometimes barely recognizable, sometimes with surprising clarity.

The wisdom in “keep what you’ve got by giving it all away” begins to make sense when viewed through this lens. Generosity creates generous responses, not through some mystical mechanism, but through the practical reality that people tend to mirror the energy they receive. Kindness begets kindness; anger begets anger. We shape the world that shapes us in return.

This isn’t to suggest a simplistic moral universe where good deeds are automatically rewarded and bad ones punished. The echoes are too complex for that, bouncing off too many surfaces, mixing with too many other sounds. Sometimes the echo comes back changed in ways we don’t expect. Sometimes it takes so long to return that we’ve forgotten we ever made the original sound.

Breaking the Cycle

The dog will likely never understand that he’s responding to himself. But we have a capacity for reflection—in both senses of the word—that might allow us to break the cycle. When we find ourselves in conflict, we might pause to ask: What am I reflecting back to the world? What echoes am I creating?

This doesn’t mean becoming passive or accepting mistreatment. It means developing the awareness to distinguish between genuine external challenges and the distorted echoes of our own unresolved issues. It means taking responsibility for the sound we’re making in the world, recognizing that every bark we send out will eventually find its way back to us.

The barn doesn’t choose to create echoes—it simply reflects what reaches it. But we can choose, to some degree, what we send out into the world. We can choose the tone, the volume, the frequency of our interactions. We can learn to recognize our own voice when it returns to us, transformed by its journey but still essentially ours.

In the quiet moments between bark and echo, there’s a space for recognition. The dog may never learn to hear himself in the returning sound, but we might. Each time we find ourselves locked in conflict, each time we feel that familiar surge of righteousness or frustration, we have a choice: to bark again into the darkness, or to pause and listen more carefully to what’s calling back to us.

Perhaps wisdom isn’t about stopping the echo—that may be impossible. Perhaps it’s about becoming more intentional with our original sound, more curious about what returns, and more compassionate toward both the caller and the response. After all, we’re all just voices in the dark, trying to make sense of the sounds that surround us. The least we can do is make sure our contribution to the chorus is one we’d want to hear echoing back on a quiet evening, long after we’ve forgotten we ever made a sound at all.