.
“I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real”
― Johnny Cash
.
Imagine a door.
Behind this door is the home of your dreams.
Every room is exactly as you’ve imagined it could be, furnished just for you.
But…
The door is locked.
You don’t have the key.
Did you once have the key and lost it?
Or does someone else have the key and for whatever reason, they won’t give it to you.
.
“The only difference between me and most people is that I’m perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.”
― Rex Stout
.
Sometimes… that’s life.
Everything we want is behind a locked door.
Our focus is upon getting the key.
…
And we create entire worlds, businesses, religions, systems, and so much more around the quest for the key, to get it and then possess everything behind the locked door.
.
“There is no disappointment so numbing…as someone no better than you achieving more.”
― Joseph Heller
.
There’s always someone (sometimes us) somewhere selling some magic key, formula, potion, idea, for unlocking our potential… the door behind which limitless happiness and riches reside.
You name it, there’s an App for it… a key…
But conditions apply…
.
.
We see others getting their keys, living their dreams… why not us?
We don’t really know or care to know if those others are really in possession of keys and living their dreams, whether they are doing and having what they seem to be doing and having through the doors of our perception which see them as doing and having what we’re not doing and having, but long for…
Is it all just an illusion, a seller of keys selling keys… which they don’t have but they sell them anyway because…
None of us want to be robbed of the dream, the precious quest to unlock our door, number one, two, three, infinity…
.
“We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
― Wallace Stegner
.
The grass is always greener on the other side, in the secret garden… of our fantasy.
The comfort is greater.
The happiness more vivid.
The riches are so real they can be touched, yet remain untouched, perhaps because they are untouched.
Behind that locked door… but only when we’re locked out.
Death behind the door offers peace to a life of suffering… but do we want that particular door to open?
.
“Nowadays, if a man living in a civilized country (ha!) hears cannon blasts in his sleep, he will, of course, mistake them for thunderclaps, gun salutes on the feast day of the local patron saint, or furniture being moved by the slime-buckets living upstairs, and go right on sleeping soundly. But the ringing of the telephone, the triumphal march of the cell phone, or the doorbell, no: Those are all sounds of summons in response to which the civilzed man (ha-ha!) has no choice but to surface from the depths of slumber and answer.”
― Andrea Camilleri
.
I hurt myself today, I didn’t mean to but I did it anyway… accidentally. We do that to ourselves all the time, so much so that we hardly notice unless it shocks us… hurts in a way we feel rather than being numb to the pain.
A spark went into my eye and burned it… an eye which had recently seen a door to which I wanted to own the key.
A door to a wreck which had so much potential…
However I can’t afford the price of the key to this door, and so it shall remain locked to me.
But I can afford to dream, and in dreaming of owning this key and opening this door, I was richly rewarded with the abstract happiness of riches beyond my mortal grasp.
.
.
An idea, brought on by a mind flexibly seeking in its quest to find the key to a locked door, even though it knows it can’t have that key… it still works to have it – a doorbell which when pressed utters the sound of a primal sneeze.
Sometimes the quest for the key to a locked door may actually be better, a greater source of riches and happiness, than owning the key and opening the door.
And sometimes… it’s not.
.
“There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.”
― Wallace Stegner
.
An Upturned Soul 
I wonder if the door is sometimes locked for my own protection…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for sharing 🙂
That’s an excellent perspective to ponder… from what are you being protected, I wonder?
LikeLike
Reblogged this on The Book of Tina.
LikeLike
Thank you very much 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Like Andy says, I sometimes wonder if the door is locked for my own protection, as well. There have been times when I have been hugely frustrated at not being able to do something or other, and have later realized that I shouldn’t have been attempting it in the first place …
Thanks for the Wallace Stegner quotes. I always liked his writing.
Good post. 🙂
LikeLike
Thank you 🙂
Many years ago when I was exploring things like ‘doors of perception’ I read a book which clearly stated – don’t go through that door unless you understand the consequences.
I can’t recall the name of the author, or the book title, tip of the tongue and staying there…
I want to say Oliver Goldsmith, but that’s not the right door… although…
I remember thinking – I wish I’d read this earlier… – before I walked through the door which led me to that book and its warning – too late, and would I have listened if it had come sooner, before?
Knowing me… just first, regret the jump later…
I agree… some doors are shut because they need to be, but we don’t figure that out until later, if we figure it out at all. They’re protecting us from what we don’t want to step into… but we can’t see that because we see what we imagine is there rather than what is actually there.
Sometimes we get to see… and are thankful that it stayed locked. It protected us from what was on the other side, and our own impetuous wish to break all barriers regardless… or something like that 🙂
LikeLike