REsources for Living
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For babies, threshold moments come thick and fast. A first smile moves us into the world of reciprocal relationship. Learning to grasp an object turns you into someone who can—if only to limited extent—control your environment. A first word moves us into the world of communication. A first step opens up a whole world of independence and exploration.
The pace slows a bit as you move into childhood; still, threshold moments abound. Daycare or preschool invites you into your own social world, stepping from the parent-centered world of home and family into a community that belongs just to you. Each year the start of the new school year brings a threshold that is now ritually marked with pictures shared on Facebook. Reading a book out loud, tying your shoes, crossing the street alone, sleeping away from home, joining a sports team, earning a martial arts belt, riding a bike, playing an instrument…the list of new skills or possibilities is endless. And each one represents a step through a doorway into a life that is just a bit different than the life you left behind.
Of course, those of us who are parents tend to feel the “left behind” part a bit more keenly than the children who are stepping into new adventures. The pride you feel in realizing your child can read themself to sleep at night might carry a tinge of sadness, knowing that you are losing the ritual of reading stories to your kid at bedtime. (Of course, it also might carry more than a tinge of relief at no longer being responsible for wading through interminable night-time routines.) A young adult child going off to college or to work is stepping into the world of adulthood, with all the excitement and anxiety that goes along with that transition, and empty-nest parents have their own complex mix of emotions.
But whatever the emotion, any doorway you walk through into something new means the loss of who you used to be. A person who can read is no longer a person who sees the world purely in pictures. A person who enters a long-term relationship loses some of the freedom and independence of a single person. Any door you step through inevitably means you leave something else behind.
It calls to mind Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken,” in which a traveler contemplates two paths through the woods. People tend to assume that the poem is a celebration of choosing the road less traveled—of being independent or counter-cultural or going against the crowd. But I would argue the poem’s theme is quite different. It says:
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back
In fact, what comes just before the famous line about it making all the difference to have taken the road less traveled says “I shall be telling this with a sigh….” Not with pride or celebration at a brave choice. A sigh. Because that’s how life works. Any path you take means giving up some other path, some other version of yourself. And sure, it’s not impossible that you might go back and study biology, having given it up for engineering decades back. But “way leads on to way,” and most of the time our branching paths don’t loop back around. Every transition is a loss as well as a gain.
Of course, every transition is also a point of growth, a point of possibility. But as we get older the path we will take tends to get more and more clearly marked. Do these things to move forward in your career. Acquire these things to move up in social status or a sense of security. Do what you need to do to keep your head above water, your family clothed and fed. The places where our roads branch tend to be moments of crisis or loss—the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job.
Stepping through those difficult doorways also leads to growth and new possibilities, although it rarely feels like it at the time. But perhaps those of us who are well-along in life can also keep an eye out for doorways we do choose, moments when we opt to try something new, when we challenge ourselves to shed an old skin and emerge as someone just a bit different than we were before. The doorways of crisis and loss will come. There’s simply no way to avoid it. But the more practice we have at continually re-imagining ourselves, if only in tiny ways, the better prepared we will be for the transitions we don’t choose.
A first smile at someone who seems foreign to us. A first grasp of a new object—juggling balls or a musical instrument or knitting needles. A first word in a language we haven’t spoken before. A first step on a brave journey. It turns out that there are still plenty of doorways to walk through.
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
- A Fond Goodbye - December 1, 2020
- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
