“Every wall is a door.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose it started with yesterday’s post about trees and the ways their imperfections sometimes lead to new growth of a different sort.  The idea grew this morning during a conversation with a friend whose life is promising to change dramatically before the end of the year.  The future is uncertain, with the only certainty being that the familiar life she lives today will no longer be hers.  I thought about gnarled trees and thought about scars and thought about the wonderful things that set roots in an injury — things we could never imagine at the time of our hurt.  And then I read what Emerson had to say about walls.

“Every wall is a door.”  Now I’m smiling, as I think of a time when I was staying at a relative’s house and needed to find the bathroom in the middle of the night.  The house was dark, and I didn’t want to risk waking my hosts, so I navigated without a light.  My memory misjudged the location of a doorway, and BAM!  I walked right into the wall.  As I recall the moment of impact, all I want to say to Mr. Emerson is that I would have welcomed a door when I was met by the wall.  Fortunately, I wasn’t moving very fast when I had my close encounter, but when we hit walls that pop up in the midst of our daily life, the impact often is greater.

“Every wall is a door.”  How can this be?

I think Emerson was talking about the groove in the tree trunk or the scar on the person when he talked about walls.  Sometimes it just takes a wall to slow us down enough that we take a look at where we are headed and notice that there is more than one option available to us.  Without the wall that makes us stop and pay attention, we might not notice the open doors that offer other choices.  Maybe what we need is a change of perspective that allows us to see the wall as a challenge, not an obstacle.  When we see an obstacle, we are likely to become discouraged and either retreat or stand still and consider life hopeless.  When we see a challenge, it calls into action our experience, our creativity, and our love of new opportunities.

Here’s wishing you a day of smooth sailing; but if you should find a wall in your path, may you seize the moment and rise to the challenge.  You may find that it is a door.