Unlike Alice

“Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.”
- Andre Gide

Life is change. There's no way around it. Even if you try to sit still and do not rock the boat, life will change anyway. Yet, ruts exist. Strange that both can live simultaneously in one person's life at the same time. I would be willing to guess and even bet that most people have a little of both at almost all times. Where is your life at a standstill and where is your life rushing along - almost faster than you can sometimes consume?

Closing doors so that others will open is critical in a well lived life but so often we are looking at the closed door for so long, we fail to realize that the other door is beckoning us. After lots of hemming and hawing, we finally shut it and turn around to see a teeny, tiny door that we have to get through. Unfortunately, though - unlike Alice - we do not have the quick fix of a potion or a cookie. We will have work to do before we can get through that door. Here, in this all but empty room. We have to fill it with our needs. We have to fill it with skills and, hopefully, some well earned wisdom too. We have to learn how not to run back to that other door and open it back up again.

We will give in, however, once in a while. We will go reopen that other door because it is just THAT much easier to stay put. Or so we think. Sometimes we will be able to go back - most of the time, though, we will have found that we no longer fit in that world and we will choose to go back to the empty room that is slowly filling with knowledge about how to get through a teeny, tiny door. Much, we will find, has to do with opportunity mixed with all that learning. Timing - some might say.

At other times, we will discover that we cannot get back through the other door. Someone has locked you out and you no longer have the key. You left it sitting on the counter so someone else could scoop it up when the time was or is right.

Life is full of rooms - it's really up to you how many of them you choose to explore willingly and how many will be forced on you. Either way, when you find yourself excited for the change or you find yourself angry about the change - things will and must grow anyway. Even if you decide to live in a rut, you will still grow older. Maybe not wiser but older and when you look in the mirror, you will see the inevitable; that which you tried to avoid - a transformation.