Doorways…

Have you spent much (or any, come to that) time thinking about doors?

A door is a threshold between two places, but most of us don't really notice them, much of the time.

Think about it, though. Doors are pretty amazing things. They can connect two worlds that are wildly different. They're the point, travelled through, that takes us from somewhere to somewhere else.

Last weekend I was in Sydney to see an exhibition of Alphonse Mucha's work.

It was a grey skied morning. There was an ibis washing itself in the water feature out the front of the gallery.

The door was a tall columned sandstone archway.

When I walked through that door, I was no longer in the grey morning. The ibis was gone. I was in a different world - a place of walls covered in pictures. A kind of temple dedicated to art, to beauty, a place that held the results of centuries of inspiration.

Later that day, I stood on a platform at the train station. The sun was setting, the breeze had a chill in it. The train arrived, and the train doors slid open of their own accord.

I walked through that doorway and the gathering darkness was gone. The train carriage was brightly lit. It was warm there, the chill had gone as surely as the ibis from the morning. And when the doors opened again some time later and I walked back through them, I had been transported and I was somewhere else entirely.

Your mission for the week, should you choose to accept it, is to spend some time contemplating doors. Perhaps you'd like to pay more attention as you step through your own front door, from inside to outside and back again. What do you notice? How does it feel? And if you like, take your contemplation further and think about thresholds, in the context of times of transition you've experienced or will experience in your life, from one state of being to another.

Where were you before? If you're still passing through, what's the passage like? And if you're on the other side, where (and maybe also who) are you now?