The Barrier is the Gate

This is a Buddhist truism that recently took on an “”of course” subtitle for me. The idea is that what seems to block you is where you’ll find understanding, insight, enlightenment. This isn’t always intuitively obvious. But I was walking the dog the other day and thinking about a recent error I had made. Rose and I were in a disagreement about how to clean up her room and I decided that I could be a better parent if I would buy her another bookcase where she could put the piles of books that were accumulating on her floor. So I dragged her to the consignment store to see what we could find. The short version of the story was that we ended up with a piece of furniture that was old and charming and only by a wide stretch of the imagination could be considered a bookcase. But she loved it and cleaned up her bedroom entirely and completely and meticulously going through everything she’d owned and accumulated since toddlerhood in order to make room in her life for it. And I started to think about all the wrong pieces of furniture that have become parts of my life and what I’ve had to shed or alter or understand to make room in my life for these things and people and projects that I love.