open doors

“sliding doors” is a movie from about 10 years ago that starred gwyneth paltrow as a woman in london who one day either catchs a train or doesn’t. as the movie progresses, her life takes two paths, paths that in the end recombine in a meaningful and interesting way. i am looking for this film in my favorite DVD stores, but i can't find it… either way i continue to think about the fact that every small decision, every chance encounter could have large/meaningful or small/insignificant impacts in my life.

as a kid i would stay home from school sick and watch bob barker on the “price is right”, the show had bob offering someone the choice of three doors, once selected he would try to get the person to alter their choice. the person is standing with the crowd screaming at them “door number three”… even at seven i was enthralled watching someone choosing under pressure. the doors had either wonderful prizes or the “booby prize”… if the person selected the wrong door they would play music that sounded like “whaaa whaaa waaaaaaaa”… clearly not a good choice…

life is not a game show, but we do get to pick doors. we either make the train or we don’t. we walk over and start a conversation that can lead to a friendship or we stay where we are and may never connect with that person. we send an email, or we assume the person doesn’t remember us and we move on and think about something else. life is choice; some are a lot harder than picking from three doors while the crowd of strangers screams at you to change your mind.

every so often, i have to explain why i have literally closed the door on a person i should have loved and never been able to shut out of my life. i remember the moment, i can feel the feelings almost 30 years later like they were yesterday… it was a choice i made, one i have reconsidered but never changed. i am pretty sure i will never change it; it’s a decision that fundamentally altered my life. it was much more conscience than missing a train.

half a lifetime later i got a letter from someone who needed to talk to me. the letter was a mechanism to ensure a safety zone of forced distance. the distance was needed not to allow truth, but to enable a manufactured framework. i read the letter, and understood the unspoken meaning; a door was closing, one that was promised to always be open. i flashed back to watching nixon step down from office. strangely these two moments in my life were tightly tied together. they were both moments that would lead to my needing to decide if i was going to close and lock a door myself.

i have a best friend, we live far apart, we don’t talk every day, our lives drift as we live them, but we have an agreement that everyone else we care about knows and is not given a vote on. we agree that no matter what, if one of us knocks the other will open the door. i will be happy with this arrangement for the rest of my life, because it is done out of commitment not obligation. having someone choose to accept you is much deeper than having them do it out of some obligatory need.

the second time i made the choice, i chose to move behind a door, but gave the other person a set of keys and the instruction that i saw the door not as mine, but ours. i understand that we need to have the door between us, but even if it’s locked… they know it can be opened. when i am not there, they can come in and just sit or take a shower and a nap, whatever it takes to feel clean and rested. i could not shut a door like that a second time in my life, if i did i knew it would require me to add locks and bolts which i might never get open again. sometimes safety comes with its own risk, and this risk i was not willing to take.

big and small decisions, doors that are open and closed, opportunities taken and lost, and threads of life that somehow find a way to come back together. but these same threads can also find a way to move apart, to weave in different directions with no apparent connection. the tapestry of life is big and bright and complex. random events are really trillions of decisions which have added up to a point in time and space. randomness is really just amazing complexity.

the only way you might realize you are behind a locked door is when you look down and see that you have two sets of keys in your hands. all you can do is hope someone will knock.