The Hallway Between Doors

I learn by going where I have to go. - Theodore Roethke, "The Waking"

Two Weeks I Did Not Ask For

The two weeks came without warning. I didn't request them, and I didn't plan for them. They landed in the middle of a job change I am still not sure I should have made.

I closed one door. I opened another. I have no idea whether the new one leads anywhere better. Some mornings I am convinced it was a mistake. Then I think about closing it, and I know that would be a second mistake stacked on the first.

Everyone knows the saying. When one door closes, another opens. It gets handed to you at funerals and layoffs and divorces, and it is meant as a kindness. Nobody says a word about the hallway between the two.

Here is what the hallway looks like from the inside. The door behind me is locked. I could not walk back through it if I tried. And what is ahead of me is not one door. There are several. I can see all of them. I cannot tell which one is the future and which one is the next mistake, and standing here does not make it clearer.

William Bridges taught American literature until 1974, then left the university and spent the rest of his life on this exact problem. He called it the neutral zone. The old thing has ended, and the new one has not formed. He also drew a line I keep coming back to. A change is an event. The job ends on a Friday. A marriage ends with a signature. A child moves away to college on a weekend. Transition is the slower work of figuring out who you are afterward, and it runs on its own clock.

So, I took three days of the two weeks and drove to the Porcupine Mountains. Three days. By myself. No plan.

The Hum That Will Not Shut Off

Looking back, the last hallway was boring. That is the word I reach for now, three years out from it. Nothing happened in there. I went to work. I came home. I did it again.

That is not the word I had at the time.

At the time it was unsettling. Nothing is asked of you in a hallway. No one needs a decision from you. No one waits on your answer. For a man who built his sense of worth on being needed, that is not rest. It is a hum that will not shut off.

The hum is what does the damage. The dangerous part is not the hallway; it is the dread underneath it. So, we take the nearest job, the nearest relationship, the nearest version of ourselves that arrives with a title attached, because a wrong answer quiets the hum and no answer never will.

The other way out is to stop moving. Wait for clarity. Refuse to take a step until the right door is obvious. That one feels more responsible, and it costs the same.

A year later, we stand in a longer hallway wondering how we got there, and this time we chose it.

Boring is the word you get afterward. It is what a hallway becomes once you already know it worked out. It is worth nothing to you while you are standing in one.

Eight Thirty on the Shore

The second morning I hiked out to the Presque Isle trail. It was around eight thirty. I sat down on the shore of Lake Superior, and there was nobody else out there.

I did not want to leave that shore. I wanted to stop moving and stop fighting and stop talking and stop producing, and I wanted that shore to become a permanent part of who I am. I sat there and built the case for staying.

It took me a while to understand what I was looking at.

Close to three years ago, I lived in another hallway. I was single. I had not met Megan. Work was grinding me down, and I showed up and did it anyway. If you had asked me then whether I was happy, I could not have given you a straight answer, and I still cannot. But something got built in there. I know that now because I am standing on it.

I could not see any of it at the time. Not one day of it felt like construction. It felt like waiting.

That is what the Lake Superior shore was offering me. Not escape. Recognition. I was sitting inside the only kind of place that has ever made me into anything, and I wanted a guarantee that this one would do the same.

Nobody gives you that.

What I Carried Back Down

I did not go out there with a method. I want to be honest about that. What follows is what I noticed on the drive home, looking back at what I had already done without deciding to do it.

I named what ended. Not the job. The version of me that job made possible. That is a different loss, and it took me most of the first day to say it plainly.

I separated what ended from what did not. The work ended. What I know how to do did not leave with it. Those are two different things, and they do not feel like two different things at three in the morning.

I stopped choosing for a while. I had been running through the doors in my head for weeks. Then I drove to a place where not one of them was available to me. That was not avoidance. Fear makes the nearest door look like the only door, and you cannot adjust for that while you are standing in front of it.

I moved. This is the part I cannot explain and will not stop reporting. Walking does not pick your future. It changes the conditions you think under. My body goes first, and my mind comes along behind it, and it has worked that way every time, and I still do not know why.

I tested instead of declaring. Three days is a small experiment. So is a phone call, a class, an unfamiliar trail. The question afterward is not whether it worked. The question is what it taught me.

And I kept no record of the last hallway. That is the one I got wrong. I built something in there, and I cannot tell you what I did, only where I ended up standing. So, I am writing this one down while I am still inside it.

That is the whole reason this exists. Not because I healed. I did not. I am trying to understand why the trail keeps doing this to me, and I would rather work it out in front of you than hand you a conclusion I have not earned.

The Embers

I stood up from that shore anyway.

I do not have a reason for you. I didn't talk myself into it, and I didn't reach a conclusion out there. At some point I got up.

I put the pack back on. I gathered the camera gear off the rock. I turned around and walked back toward the truck.

See you on the trail,

Michael