Tuesday, October 10^th, Café Iruna, Pamplona, Spain

The doors in Europe have personality. The one above is from Italy. Some doors need a stout coat of paint or shellac, while others are lovingly maintained.  A few of the centuries old doors are covered with graffiti and are suffering abuse.  I’m intrigued by old wooden doors in the historical areas of the big cities like Rome, and the more quaint towns like Assisi. I especially love the doors in smaller villages.  I wonder how many generations of people have lived behind the doors, and whether they ever noticed their beauty and thought about their history.   

I’ve been photographing unique doors everywhere on this trip and once I become more adept at editing photos I will post a collage of all of the doors I’ve seen.

As each door grabs me, I keep thinking about the phrase, “When one door closes, another opens.”  

I didn’t know that it was Alexander Graham Bell who made that well known statement.  After researching it, I found that the entirety of the quote is “when one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

That’s a pretty cool insight from Mr. Graham Bell. 

Retirement was the closing of a big, hunky door for me.  I’d opened that door pretty much seven days a week for forty years.  Fortunately, I already knew there were a bunch of new doors to peak behind.  I just needed to give myself permission to close that hunky door.  I was hankering to return to my creative side and to dive into writing.  The sequel to Stalin’s Priests, my first historical novel that Erik and I self-published in 2018, was rolling around in my head. And I was ready to explore the world and take more than two weeks once a year to pretend to be on vacation. 

I visited with a former colleague after I retired.  She asked me how it was going and then said, “I can’t retire, I don’t have any hobbies.  I don’t know what I would do with all that free time.” 

That got me thinking about how, sometimes, our lives can be one dimensional if we aren’t careful.  It’s not just about one door closing and another door opening.  It is about our focus in the present and lifting our heads up to check out new things. 

People who have multiple doors that they open through the years have richer, more fulfilling lives.  My friend Becky is one of those people.  She is a dedicated and hard-working professional who sometimes works from home until mid-night, but she is also multi-dimensional.  She is a crafter and artist and makes personalized gifts from an amazing high-tech craft room for the people she cares about.  She and her husband are avid hikers and birders and can identify a bird from their song.  She is a quiet woman until she gets to know you, then she is warm and giving and loyal.  When Becky retires, she will not be bored.  She is living that multi-dimensional life in the moment.   

With every ending of something is a new beginning.  As scary as it might be to cross over the threshold of the new open door, embracing the change and unknown can be exhilarating as well.  Things come and go.  Every ending is also a new beginning!