Doors, windows, and escape hatches

This post is mostly off-topic ramblings created by my coffee soaked Sunday morning brain, but it speaks to where I am in my life. If you're here for art and dance...check back later, I'm sure I'll update following my sword workshop this afternoon.

I've written before about my mother and father's turns of phrase. They are such colorful people, and I am lucky to have them in my life. Today I am musing on one of my mom's catch phrases: "When God closes a door, He opens a window." My mother is very religious person and though we had disagreements about her faith versus mine often when I was younger, I have come to deeply respect my mother's faith. Though I do not share all of her beliefs, we have a much wider overlap than I once thought, and I have to give her major thumbs up-edness for her conviction and dedication to both her principles and faith.

That being said, I still like to rephrase my mother's saying in my own head to: "When the universe locks all the doors, it will provide an escape hatch (even if the hatch happens to be under a heavy rock in the less used corner of your personal metaphysical space)"

My mom's phrase is SO much more succinct, don't you think.

Yet, both mean the same thing. There are always opportunities and possibilities in your life. You always have more options than you think you do. Just because a choice is difficult, scary, or new to you doesn't mean that you can't make it.

We all get stuck in ruts, look at our lives, and feel like we just can't get out or can't change. Example: I could never move to X place because I have all of this heavy furniture that would just be so difficult to get there. Solution: get rid of everything and start over in X place. Yes, it's a super scary idea for us modern folks, but think about it. Once upon a time whole families consolidated all of their belongings down to what they could carry and journeyed across the sea, mountains, desert, etc to find a new life and they did it all without bank accounts, cars, bottled water, restaurants, air conditioning, etc. It wasn't easy, but they did it...and you can overhaul your life too if you so choose. You just have to make the choice.

Most of the time, we are faced with issues much less dramatic than above, but that doesn't mean that facing a new direction in our lives isn't just as frightening as the idea of giving up everything and starting over, because many times that is exactly what we feel like we are doing. Starting a new job or leaving an old, moving to a new home, ending or beginning a relationship - are all the emotional equivalent to starting completely from scratch...and making the choice to do any of these things can be terrifying because once you chose, you have dedicated yourself to that path and must make it work at all costs...wrong. There's an escape hatch somewhere, even if you have to look under the metaphysical rug to find it.

I have recently been inspired to get up, shake the dust off of my brain, and make some frightening decisions. The results are still coming in, but I've got one dance class set and ready to go starting in July on Wednesdays at Equilibrium Zen Gym and two more in the works, hopefully starting in two weeks. I'm waiting to hear back from a group of artists that I may be sharing studio space with downtown, my work is going into a gallery in Columbia at the end of July, and I'm looking for a new place to live. It took a lot of emotional preparation to get here, and I'm terrified of failing, but I'm going for it anyway. And I know that if it doesn't work out, somewhere in my metaphysical room, the universe will stick an escape hatch, even if I have to conjure an invisible ladder to get to it.