Doors open shut

When one door closes, another one opens. It’s a reassuring cliché.

But it’s not that simple, is it, folks?

Suppose that door closed because YOU closed it. You knew it was time—or, yep, past time to shut the door. The choice was yours. The timing was yours. And, in making that choice, in planning the closing of that door, you most likely took a long walk down the hallway and noted all those other doors just waiting for you to open. You may not have known what was behind any of them, but you knew something was. Of course, there was anxiety. You were about to move from the known to the unknown. But, as my friend Des will undoubtedly write in the comments to this little essay, every next second is the unknown. But when it’s your choice to shut the door, you don’t mourn. You celebrate.

But suppose the door-slamming is a gut-punch: You’re fired. Your loved one goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never returns (remember that expression?). You get that diagnosis. This is an entirely different kind of door slamming, and it may be—at least for a while—impossible to imagine there are other doors out there. You keep looking back, in disbelief, in anger, in grief, at that one that is forever closed.

I am thinking now of a different sort of door-shutting, like the way those soft-closed drawers in high-end kitchens close: slow and soundless. You hardly know it has happened. I am thinking also of one of my favorite lines from Joan Didion (bear with me…I think this will make sense): “It is easier to see the beginnings of things than the end. What I mean is that you know the beginning, the opening of that door. The beginning is a power move. But over time, that door may begin to close so slowly, so noiselessly that you don’t notice until it is almost shut. What? How did that happen? Do you mourn? Do you celebrate? Or maybe you give it that last push. That’s a power move. Because, ya know, when one door closes, another one opens.