Your Life Isn't Bad. But Is It the Life You Really Want?

Sometimes new possibilities appear in unexpected places. The difficult part can be recognising the gateway — and deciding whether to walk through.

Your life isn't bad.

There may be plenty in it that you value and would never want to lose. People you love. A home that feels like home. Familiar routines and small pleasures that make an ordinary day worthwhile.

And yet, sometimes, there can still be a quiet feeling that something is missing.

Something you once meant to do.A different direction you might have taken.An interest you've never quite found time to explore.Perhaps simply a sense that there ought to be... something more.

Some years ago, I spent a little time working with a life coach. She gave me a piece of advice I've always remembered.

Whenever you walk through a doorway, she told me, square your shoulders and remind yourself that you're a worthwhile person.

I've thought of that many times since.

But lately I've been thinking about doorways themselves.

Not all the important doorways or gateways in our lives appear where we expect them to.

I often come across them while I'm walking with my dogs.

This week I found one in a hedgerow.

It wasn't an impressive entrance. There were no great stone pillars, no sign telling me what lay beyond. Just an opening amongst the leaves and branches.

And, as I often do, I found myself wondering:

Where does that go?

There's a wonderful moment in Ghostbusters when they discover a mysterious doorway. Someone asks; ‘Where does it go?’ And are told, with splendid understatement:

'It goes through!'

Well, yes.

But through to where?

Perhaps some of life's opportunities are rather like that.

They don't arrive labelled New Beginning or This Will Change Your Life.

They may arrive as a chance conversation. An unexpected invitation. Someone we hadn't expected to meet. Something that catches our interest. An idea that keeps returning and won't quite leave us alone.

Most will probably lead somewhere fairly ordinary.

Some may turn out to be dead ends.

And occasionally, perhaps, one opens onto somewhere we never expected to find.

We can't know without walking through.

Maybe that's part of what makes new possibilities both exciting and frightening. We have to leave, at least briefly, the place where we already know what happens next.

And perhaps we don't always need to know where a gateway leads.

Sometimes it's enough to notice that it's there.

And decide whether we want to walk through.