The Old Door

Have you ever wondered why most people don't take that one bold step that will change the course of their life? I am not sure if it's going to change for the better or worse, but it will change.

Come to think of it, we say we want to change, we declare it on the first of January, we tell our closest friend that this year, finally, things will be different. And then a small crisis brews on the horizon, just a little one to begin with, and our feet do something curious. They turn around. They start walking back, almost on their own, to the very house we said we were leaving. The roof leaks, the walls have mold, the floor has rotted through in places, but it is the house we know. And in a storm, the known leaks feel safer than the unknown sky.

During the ashram events earlier this year, a woman's name came up for a one-on-one meeting. As most of you know, such meetings last anywhere between two and five minutes, but she was able to articulate her question, wrap it in context, and walk out with an answer.

For several years, she told me, she had wanted to leave her narcissistic husband. But for just as many years she had also wanted to stay. Every time her husband shouted at her, she would pick up her phone, type out the message to her parents, delete it, then make him a cup of tea (albeit not immediately). The crisis would pass, the tea would be drunk, and life would continue exactly as before, only with one more brick added to the wall around her heart. She even left him on more than two occasions but then went back, once voluntarily and the other time at her husband's earnest bidding. No prizes for guessing that things went back to how they were soon after: toxic, tense, and depressing.

"Why am I so weak?" she asked me. "Why do I keep going back?"

It's easier to say that it's a lack of courage or this, that and the other, but the truth is that going back is not always weakness. That's the first thing we get wrong about ourselves. We assume the woman who returns to the unhappy house is weak, the man who returns to the bottle is weak, the entrepreneur who runs back to his desk job after his first failed venture is weak. But I don't think it's weakness. If you ask me, I'd say somewhere it's memory. The body remembers the shape of the old chair, the mind remembers the path home. When the lights go out, the hand reaches for the wall it has touched a thousand times before, even if that wall has been the source of its bruising.

Mulla Nasrudin had lived in the same crumbling house for ten years. Every so often he climbed his ladder with a bucket of mud and patched a crack in the wall, only to find that two new ones had opened up by the following month.

One afternoon a young neighbor, exasperated, said to him, "Mulla, why don't you just pull the whole thing down and build a new house?"
"And throw away a decade of fine repair work?" Mulla exclaimed. "Yeah, right!"

But, but, but, what if, just once, just this one time, you didn't go back?

Not because going back (or not going back) is wrong or the old house is evil, or someone told you that real men and real women take the plunge. None of that drivel. But simply because, just this once, you want to know what is on the other side of the wave. You have spent your whole life running ashore the moment the water rose to your knees. Today, the water is at your knees again. What would happen, what would actually happen, if you let it rise to your waist, to your chest, to your chin?

I don't know the answer, and perhaps neither do you. That is the entire point.

It might help to see the crisis as a door as opposed to a problem. Most of our lives are spent in sealed rooms, walls we've grown fond of decorating, quietly convinced there is no way out. And then the crisis comes, and for a fleeting moment a door we never knew was there swings open.

Most of us slam it shut. We say, oh, this is uncomfortable, I'll go back to my room, thank you, and the door closes, and the same daily drudgery seeps in.

I feel what matters the most in a period of crisis is steadiness. If you commit to hold yourself steady and not choose between flight or freeze or retreat, if you promise to not run back to the familiar dock, you will discover a new side of you. It will be uncomfortable, at times even painful, but it will be empowering beyond your wildest dreams. That independence of the consciousness you might have always sought almost cannot arrive without you taking that bold step. Your old self will beg you to turn around and tread the familiar territory but that's precisely the point to discard the old self like tattered clothes.

I am not suggesting that you let your life fall apart. What I am telling you is that when it does begin to fall apart on its own (everyone's does in one way or another, at some point in time), when the wind picks up and your old roof begins to shake, you have a choice. You can run inside and hold the beams up with your bare hands one more time. Or, just once, you can step outside, into the rain, and see what your face does when it finally feels weather.

While I don't wish to glamorize danger for someone whose actual situation has real stakes, you may, however, discover that the danger is in staying and not of the unknown. When you don't turn back in crisis, things may or may not pan out the way you'd wished. But either way, you will discover something, which is more than the old house has given you all these years.

And if it helps, know this: the storm did not come to destroy you but ask you a question, and it's the same question it has been asking since you were a child. Are you going back, or are you going through?

Your call. As always.

Peace.
Swami