One door closes

There are those times in our lives when we feel the sharp breeze of a door shutting in our face. We feel the sting and the pain. We are surprised and dismayed. We are sad and we are mad. A door has shut. A door we wished had been opened. A door we thought was the path to our future.

There are other doors we close ourselves. We say good-bye. We turn away. We look down and we take a step. But sometimes our hand remains on that door. Just waiting. Just wondering. If the time was different. If things were to change. If people were to be not who they are but who we wish them to be. We don't want to close that door completely. We want to keep the option open.

And then the unthinkable happens. The door closes outside of our control. We can no longer look back. We can no longer wonder if. We can only know that we may have wanted to stay and we may have wanted to hope, but the hope is gone and it's time to move on.

There are times when a door closes whether we want it to or not and all we can do is to focus on that door and to be sad and cry at the loss. But the funny thing about doors closing is that somewhere, sometime, another one is creaking open. We can't see it now. We can only see the darkness and the blackness and the bleakness of the one shut. We can't see the light emerging down the hall.

So maybe the answer is to close our eyes. To turn away from the dark and turn away from the pain. To look inside ourselves to see what it is we want next. To decide for ourselves where it is we want to go. Because closing doors means we have only ourselves to answer to.  Closing doors means we stand alone and on our own. Closing doors means we can put the past where it belongs. Closing doors means we can solidly shut away all that didn't work and wasn't good. Closing doors means somewhere there is one slowly opening. Even if we can't see it now, it is there. And when we get there we will understand just why we had to lock this one shut before opening the next.

This is the life.
-a