The Door Latch

I was thinking lately of how many idioms we have using the door as metaphor. Can you come up with a few? Yeah, me too.

• "Bar the door, Katy!" (I don't know what that one means, either)
• Falling through the trap door
• Beat a path to your door
• Door-to-door
• Get your foot in the door
• Dead as a door-nail
• Go back door

And let us not forget the door's most famous euphemism: When one door closes, another opens.

Seems we Americans like our doors...as long as they're gleaming red with polished brass handles, sturdy knockers, beveled glass panes and very - and I mean VERY well-oiled hinges.

I'm reading a memoir about an author's varied, heart-wrenching-and-elating adventures as an ambassador with Population Services International, with which she works to improve Public Health on a global scale. As is always the case with memoir, the reader must enter into a dual willingness: to become - however temporarily - a part of the writer's world while also distinctly separating enough from it to actually consider it. After all, one gets quite little from a life story they become rather than experience.

Needless to say, then, I find myself pulling back from some of her messages and leaning toward others. But there is one - and really JUST one - that grabbed me by the intellectual, and perhaps, emotional collar and held with the grip of human compassion - a tight-fisted advocate, to be sure. What was it? Americans are privileged. And we don't know it. Can't know it. Not really. Because, like reading a fine memoir, you can't experience it if you are it. We are Americans: we don't know any different. Nor do we know any better, actually, but not for the reasons non-Americans think: we're not ignorant or proud or self-centered. At least not all of us, and not all of the time. What we are is, quite simply, what we are. And, for as good as we've got it, there's little better with which to compare.

So what's the point? Let us not stop there! Let's go further! Do more. See more. Go bigger. However, whenever, we can. Let us not stand on the threshold of our contented door and look to the world, near and far, and say, "I am privileged. I have enough. There is nothing better beyond my door." If we do, we are then living - trapped - by our doors...our gleaming red, polished brass handled, glass beveled, oily hinged doors.


Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, "Men live on the brink of myteries and harmonies into which they never enter. And with their hand on the door latch, they die outside."

Whatever view your porch offers, THERE is your place of impact. THERE is your place of purpose. THERE is your place of mystery and harmony, waiting for discovery. THERE is your way to live.

Being privileged, you know, is not a crime. 

Leaving your hand on the door latch is.