I was thinking again about choice and chance, and it made me remember a post I'd written in 2008.
One door closes, another door opens. That’s a nice idea.
Thing is, life doesn’t always work like that, does it? There are times when one door closes, and - it just closes. The opportunity has gone and it won’t be coming back. John Lennon was shot and now you’ll never see the Beatles play live.
You wouldn’t close one of these doors if you thought there was the tiniest prospect you might want to pass through it later. Maybe sometimes you don’t have a choice. Or what about those times when you didn’t even realise the door was there until you hear it clang shut ominously behind you? Or the sudden breeze and then there’s a slam - is that bad luck? Or random? Or part of the cosmic pattern? The beat of a butterfly’s wing on the other side of the world?
The path-in-the-wood analogy is one we love, so evocative. But even when we’ve chosen the road less travelled, and wandered down it quite happily for ages, it gives a feeling that perhaps we could re-trace our steps and choose the other path later if it didn’t turn out as we’d hoped.
Life just isn’t like that.
Maybe this realisation is the part where we finally grow up. The part where we start to understand that some doors are closed to us forever now. The part where we have to accept that and look onwards to the bright doors that are still ahead of us.
Does it get easier, in time, to do that? After a while, will I stop looking behind me to those tightly-closed doors tinged the soft dove-grey of regret?
No comments:
Post a Comment