Carrots are fun.They dangle in the back of your mind and you can think about them occasionally, while entertaining the idea of going to play with it at some future date. Then every once in a while, you stretch your little bunny legs and take a shot at getting it down from it's perch. The Carrot is carefree, without commitment and is generally good dating exercise.
Doors are a little more complicated. Doors are to be walked through, they take commitment and dedication, and can only exist when the desire for one is mutual, and intentions are pure. You spend ample time pondering about what lies beyond the door, and weighing your options to see if it's what you really want. And much like Let's Make a Deal, it's a gamble. Door #1 may not contain the shiny new car you were hoping for, leaving you filled with disappointment, and a continued quest for another Door.
Now, while Doors tend to be scarier than Carrots, they're essentially what we're all looking for. Within each of us is a desire to walk through a good Door, and never have to search for another one ever again.
Yesterday I closed a very old Door. The feelings are mature, they've been tried, and tested and they run extremely deep, but have never been expressed by either party. For a long time I've wondered if it even was a Door....it felt like more than a Carrot, and when we were together it felt like more of a Door than I've ever known.... Just recently we were honest with each other. We had both, most certainly, been keeping this door alive - for years - but walking through that door required more than either of us could give, not because we were selfish....in fact it was the opposite. Because we loved each other, we knew that this place we had reached had to be the end. To go further than this would mean the deterioration of everything we had built. So now, here we stood, before this door that had always been envisioned but had never actually manifested, and just moments after it came into being, we chose to let it go...
To be honest, I hurt.
For majority of my adult life, this Door has been in my heart as a place of safety and refuge; a sanctuary I could visit in moments of distress. It was a place of hope that embodied the happiest moments of my life. Something I'd kept sacred and told no one about...and now I feel it slowly fading away as each memory comes back individually to say good-bye. It hurts...differently than it's ever hurt before. It's a mourning for a future that, for 7 years, had been carefully woven together with hope and love, but can never exist.
Fortunately the Lord, in His infinite wisdom, timed the passing of this Door in the middle of a Carrot...a good, light-hearted, fun, extremely casual, catered-to-my-current-needs...Carrot.
It just reminds me that, in all things, death always brings new life.
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