The way out is through. –Goethe
It was early morning. I was sitting in a coffee shop and a young mother and her young daughter entered. The young girl was distraught. As I observed her and listened I learned that the young girl was to go off to kindergarten for the first time — and she didn’t want to go. She was afraid. Her mother was patient, reassuring and yet firm — her daughter was going to go to kindergarten.
How many parents over how many years have had a similar conversation with their daughter or son? The conversation might have been about the first day of kindergarten, or perhaps the first grade, or maybe even ‘going off to college.’ Loving parents listen and respond to their concerns. They reassure and support. And they hold firm — it will not benefit the child nor the parent(s) if the child does not cross this particular threshold.
When I-You-We choose only that which eases our anxiety or our fear we lose out. In choosing relief we turn our backs to the ‘Way Open’ and we cement our feet to the threshold while looking at the past. We cannot go back — this is an illusion that quickly manifests itself when we try to do so. In going ‘back’ we soon become lost and confused for this is not where we belong; the land that was once ‘home’ is now alien to us. We learn that our anxiety and fear is not diminished — it might well be ‘put on hold’ for a time but it will only return with more intensity.
One of the challenges of stepping off of the threshold into the ‘Way Open’ comes when we know we must make a choice as to how we are going to proceed with our life. Too often these life-choices are made while it is still unclear as to how the choice will enable us to develop more fully, how it will enable us to use our gifts and talents and abilities to meet the needs of the world we will be stepping into. We feel a tug to go back. We want to cling to the known [you might remember, gentle reader, that in Afghani, the verb ‘to cling’ is the same as the verb ‘to die’]. If we have discerned a ‘guide’ that has helped us navigate our way we might now question whether we really trust him or her. Our challenge involves holding our anxiety and fear with gentleness, taking a deep breadth of faith, and then stepping across the threshold into the ‘Way Open.’
Although the choices we face might be important ones, even life changing ones, like: which job to take, where to live, whom to marry, how much money to save or when to retire; the choices I am now thinking of are deeper and more far-reaching. These choices include the development of our capacity for compassion, for love, for being trust-worthy, for being trust-builders, for living a life of non-compromising integrity. Stepping into the unknown ‘Way Open’ requires trust, faith and hope — in ourselves and in something greater than ourselves [God, the Transcendent, Humanity, etc.]. How will the ‘Way Open’ help me become a more loving person, a more compassionate person, a more empathetic person, a more forgiving person? How will the ‘Way Open’ enable me to feel more deeply and respond more fully to the world’s pain? How will the ‘Way Open’ enable me to discern the needs that I might help address using my gifts, talents and abilities?
Like the young girl faced with the threshold of stepping into kindergarten, we each have had and will have times of such life-changing choice. Like the little girl, we all need the love and support of another (or a number of others) as we face the anxieties and fears that come with these types of choices. And like the little girl, in the end we have to take the step across the threshold alone for it is our life that we are called to live.
Searcher-Seeker 