"And a Window Closed"

I was saying to a friend the other day how I had always had trouble backing up in a car until I learned to trust in and use my mirrors, when she started to laugh… and then told me this story of her own.

“A good many years ago when cars only had two mirrors, the rear-view one and the one on the left, she was driving along the road, checking in the rear mirror from time to time as we all do, to see what the traffic was like behind her, when that mirror fell off, landing on the floor of the car. Her immediate feeling was that a ‘window had closed’ in her world!”

Her reaction was so vivid and so strong that she still remembers to this day exactly what it felt like way back then, still remembers that feeling of loss, the shock of losing something that was there only seconds earlier.

If you have ever questioned the theology of your childhood, as I have, you can relate to this feeling of things not being the same, of a window closing in your life. There is just that kind of period between when the ‘old man in the sky’ no longer works for us, until we formulate a new understanding or concept of just who or what God or the Divine is. As the old meanings for our ‘religious vocabulary’ cease to resonate with us and until we find new ways of expressing those meanings we are now experiencing, we are indeed living in a universe with ‘a closed window’. Until we learn to live with and to accept as normal living in the tension between what was known and what is yet to come, until we can live in that paradox, we will find ourselves looking back, trying to discover again, and again, that window that has closed forever.

Unlike in the story of my friend, where the mirror could be re-affixed and that window once again would open up for her, once we have lost the window into our past beliefs, they can never be reclaimed. We have changed in the act of losing them, and have moved on into a new reality from which there is no going back to what once was.

As I write this, I think of all those who have been open enough, brave enough, and vulnerable enough to share the ‘closed windows’ in their lives with me and who have helped me to live in that tension between what was and what is yet to be, by listening to my thoughts, by encouraging me to explore new paths, and by helping me find my way back when I have fallen off that path. To all of you, those whose ideas I met between the covers of a book and in the virtual world, as well as those who have shared in my journey in person, you have all played a huge part in not only who I am today, but also in who I will become and so "Thank you" for helping me open up a new window through which to see my world.

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NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

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