On Opening Doors

Before I opened the door, the action seemed insignificant, inconsequential, almost irrelevant. It was just another door in a world of doors: let’s have a peek behind this one.

HURRAY!!! there are hundreds of people all smiling at you and raising their cocktail glasses and cheering your name, wanting to put you up on their shoulders.

Maybe it's not that dramatic: maybe you open the door quietly, and enter the calm place, and go in and sit down and wonder at things, or get up and walk around, for two or three hours, or days or weeks or months or years.

Every and each period of time passes calmly, with nothing much to do, except maybe pausing to eat, now and again, and go to the bathroom, and sleep.

But then you come back, and Holy Cow: everything is different.

You long for wood-smoke in the airport; you remember huge butterflies.

It was all because of that door: I opened that door, and I didn't think anything of it: I was just going to have a look.

I was going to come right back.

Some doors don’t close.