This question is, in its truest element, one that can reveal so much if we allow ourselves to ponder on it. I hope that we’ll reveal a bit of it through this blog, but the discovery really is yours to own. And I have a feeling that the more you engage the question, the more you’re going to like it.
So, the question is: what closed door do you need to trust?
This can be a big statement. Especially when the door is a channel to passions, dreams or goals that you’ve relentlessly worked towards. How can you trust a closed door when it closes on something like that?
Let’s see if we can answer some of your questions.
One of the books we’ve delved into this year is called Failing Up, by Lesley Odom Jr. Lesley is famous for is role of Aaron Burr in the Hamilton Broadway, which led him to receive a tony awards for best actor. In his book, he tells us how as a young man he confidently applied to four universities around New York. He believed he had the resume to walk into any one of his choice. And he did have that – a brilliant school record and 3 months Broadway experience in the production Rent. This had always been his dream. And yet, one by one, each door closed. Eventually, he was accepted into a university in Philadelphia. This was not his first choice. But, it was through this experience that he says the following:
How beautiful is that?
The closed doors didn’t mean the closing of his dreams. It just meant he had to walk to a different beat than what he expected. I’m sure many of us can share the frustration that he had. Perhaps not in the same situation, but maybe situations like the below:
– When you have a certain ambition or dream and your health keeps working against you, regardless of your efforts.
– The customer you’re so sure you’ll get after spending all that time and money on them – and you don’t.
– Perhaps it is that CV you send out over and over, trying to break into a particular organisation or field, with no avail.
As I contemplate this, a couple principles come to mind for me:
- A healthy stance in life is the recognition that we cannot control outcomes, but we can control today’s actions. As long as I show up and do the good work today, we can trust opportunity to show up.
- When we sometimes surrender a closed door we probably increase our levels of resilience rather than decrease it. Al Siebert in his book, The Survivor Personalities states, “the best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost. For this reason they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore harder to threaten.”
- Some things don’t have answers, and maybe should remain unanswered. Our human tendency to always want to find a justification or reason can sometimes lead us into misconception. Sometimes we need to accept that we wont find the answer.
Over time I’ve come to realize that try as we might to knock down all the barriers, every now and then we have to trust the closed doors. I like the “every now and then”, because there are some doors that we are able to bash down, and we need to push through. And then there are some doors that just don’t budge; eventually making you know that it’s not meant to be. You’ve tried, and it’s not happening, and you need to surrender it.
I think if you had to ask just about anybody you admire that has achieved some form of success in life if they had to just trust a closed door, they’d say yes. And if you asked whether there was a door they had to stubbornly bash until it came down, they’d probably say yes too.
So, may we move through life by tapping into our inner wisdom, giving ourselves those coffee stop moments so that we can truly ponder this and listening to the quiet voice of intuition in all of us.
2 replies on “What closed door do you need to trust?”
This one has really resonated with me. I have had a recent season in my life display exactly these traits, and it is somewhat comforting to know that sometimes you can say, it’s okay that this door has closed. I do not have to spend valuable energy trying to open it again.
Thanks for the read!
So glad to hear you enjoyed the read @GLeigh, and that it resonated with you! We love to hear this.
Thanks for the comment.
Regards,
Cafe Life Team