Open Doors

Existence is a gauntlet in which all things are endlessly bound by conflict. It is a gauntlet of doors, ever opening, ever closing, ever narrowing or broadening our list of choices. Upon realizing the doors exist, it is no surprise to find that most of them are shut.

I became entranced by the ideas of doors and their metaphysical implications during my training to be a flight attendant, where we practiced gratuitously on the process of arming and disarming doors—not to be confused with locking them—and I began to contemplate the safety features of the aircraft and reflect on how the existential doors of the universe seem to operate in an eerily similar fashion... One safety feature in particular was how, if a door were armed and opened from the inside, the rapid inflation of an evacuation slide would be triggered, but nothing triggers when an armed door is opened from the outside. This one-sided defensive function resonated with me because it mirrored the ego defense mechanisms I’ve observed in others and, at some times, even myself when it came to opening up to others. While it was always within their power to simply reveal what their interests and agendas are, there was an unspoken condition that required conformity: The doctrine of only opening up to others if, and only if, they initiated with enough genuine-sounding curiosity to encourage the display of your naked character. It isn’t as much an enforcement of standards or social decency as it is a matter of opening-up-etiquette. For one to manually open up to someone while their ego is armed would be to trigger an emotional response reserved solely for qualified personnel who are willing to assist in an emergency. But if they were the one to open you up from the outside, the emergency responses would be annulled completely—opening up would be as fluid a response as inhaling and exhaling in your sleep. It often happens without you ever realizing anything had changed, and yet the possibilities may have shifted exponentially.

Closed doors are always easier to comprehend. It’s simpler, after all, keeping a door closed.  You could seal it with a number of complex mechanical locks, passwords, puzzles, voice recognition security systems, some duct tape, the ever durable gorilla glue, hardy cement, or by placing a curved object at the base of the door. You could weld it shut with a blowtorch. You could barricade it with heavy objects. People don’t open doors they can’t figure out how to open, nor do they open doors they can’t see. Convince a man a door is a wall, and as a wall is how he will treat it. Closed minds have an affinity for closed doors due to their operational similarities.

Open doors pose a bit more of a threat to an open mind because their existence peppers you with contradictory advice: Stay. Go. Stay. Go. Stay. Go. You could go through the door and explore without the guarantee that it will remain open behind you, or you could ignore the open door and go about your life. You could remain frozen in hesitation, watching, horrified, as the door you always wanted to walk through closes in front of your eyes. Sometimes it’s shockingly easy because some doors obviously lead to places we don’t want to be, and makes them easy to avoid. The very nature of passage-ways is laced with some kind of allure or deterrent, depending, of course, on whether or not you want to stay where you are. And, as it goes without saying, all of this only applies to those who already know where they want to be, which isn’t always the case in open minded people.

Those of us who don’t necessarily know where we want to be are nonetheless doomed to being propelled toward people and places whether we like it or not. Having a direction is the price of existing. Even the subatomic particles that radiate from our stillness are lawlessly jumping around as we quietly contemplate whether or not to progress with the doors we think are available to us, and those particles are subtly compelling us to follow their example. What is the fate of this displaced person? I’ll tell you, one of three things will happen: 1) They remain curiously distracted by the doors long enough to die in front of them, never having consciously committed to the gauntlet. 2) They eventually settle, blindly and wholeheartedly, for the door within the nearest proximity to their knob-turning hand and embrace everything that door has to offer them, with either grace or disdain. 3) They open every door they see, quickly, compulsively, and indiscriminately, without due consideration of where the doors lead, who the doors belong to, or how many of their own emergency features are compromised in the process.

By virtue of your existence, you are actively engaged in this barbaric contest of deductive possibilities, of opening and closing pathways to life and death—and all that is entailed between the gray areas of each. There is a substantial portion of the world’s population, however, that thinks they found a niche in the system, a way to satiate their desires without participating in the existential gauntlet. Anyone who tries to supersede the gauntlet through routine games of philosophy, civilization, cultivation, artwork, and righteous laws of conduct are invariably terrorized by such detachments and are destroyed by these machinations. A moral compass provides no more protection than clean socks. The reactionaries, the uncivilized and uncultured drag the bystanders of life down to the abyss and make their words, their books, their busts, their paintings, and all the various monuments to their doors one with nothing. Even a dream is nothing more than a door between blinks. By engaging in the gauntlet of doors, making active decisions that are reinforced with gratuitous contemplation, you can at least keep one hand on life’s wheel.

We stand against the fatal lie that our world is governed by prevailing moods that may resist the actions of the truly free, the truly capable—those with the master key for locked doors and the sagacity of existential attunement. It is the slavery of the fearful, the crime of mental pacifism, in which much labor is wasted on the decoration of false doors. If you choose to engage in the gauntlet of possibility, be prepared to engage with everything you are, with all of your Gods, laws, and games—with everything that makes you look away from your doors. May your inevitable humbling or destruction be worthy of your audience.