"There Should Be a Door There!" or "The Truth Shall Set You Free"

When I worked with addicts years ago, one of the things that really stood out about most of my clients was the difficulty they had with accepting life the way it was.  They had a really hard time taking life on its own terms, hence the necessity, beauty and effectiveness of the Serenity Prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

No matter how much they banged their head against the wall of a situation or circumstance, insisting THERE SHOULD BE a door there, that's not where it was; nor could they create one there no matter how long or how hard they banged their head against the wall.  The most predictable outcome was going to be a headache, not a new door.

There is no freedom in stopping at the point of insisting things should be different than they are, because they can never be what they're not, and getting stopped at wanting them to be what they're not isn't enough to change them.

Hence the analogy of the door.  You see, even if it's not where we might ideally want it to be, there already is a door in the room.  Once we accept that's where the door actually is, once we accept the truth of it, there is always something we can do with it: we can paint over the existing paint or strip the paint off and stain it, cut it in half and make it a dutch door, or any number of other choices.

True freedom is accepting what IS, and getting creative about how to change it to create what you want it to look like.  We may not like the choices we have - none of them may be our ideal - but our only power lies in starting with what is, and then looking at the choices that we see from that truth.