Education Opening The Gate

The other day it struck me that my mind is like a gated community in a land that no longer remembers how it feels to live without bars. Tucked in safely behind the ornate steel and sliding mechanisms, my mind knows that it is safe from the ravages of the outside world. It gated itself in to keep out the riffraff, but in practice it is not so much about keeping undesirable elements out as it is about keeping a certain desirable element in. For a while, it was a cozy arrangement and I felt that from my fortified position within the gates, like the neighbors who make up this tiny self-enclosed community, I would be free to extend outward in easy and predictable ways in order to engage the larger world out there. I was content behind the gate of this community for quite a long time. Work and other necessities of life required various physical moves to other places, both exotic and homely, but whether I was living on a tropical island or in a blazing desert, I kept the gated community within my skull close like a hidden oasis that was always with me. I never once had the gate jam on my way out. I never once failed to gain access on my way in after punching in the key code. The gate on my community functioned flawlessly every time. Others occasionally attempted to bluster their way into my tidy little community but somehow, the gate always held them back - or most of them anyway. Rather than leaving me with a sense of isolation, however, I relished in the insular coziness and self-contained perspectives of mind, secure in the knowledge that nothing and no one could force its way past the gate without my permission. Then it happened. One day my gate stuck open and stayed that way long enough for me to realize that the world was far more magical than I had given it credit for in the past. I was enchanted by the visitors from the outside who now poked around my flowerbeds and shared jokes with the neighbors in an endless procession of colorful eccentricities that only later I came to understand as normal for the outside. I wondered if the sprinklers would somehow turn on and wash them all away. I couldn't decide to invite them in for tea or chase them away with a stick. In the end I did neither. It seemed like days had passed and the outsiders were still hanging around. Had no one repaired that gate yet? Despite myself, I began to think of them as familiar friends in an odd sort of way. They sometimes even seemed to be related to me somehow. The easy smile of that one as he relaxed in a patch of sun on my front lawn, the mysterious look of mischief in the eye of another as she related a recent exploit, the arm-waving excitement of another when illustrating a point in a story - I came to think of these strangers as welcome diversions to my otherwise routine and uneventful life. One day I was watching their antics and was suddenly struck with an overwhelming sense of sadness. What if they left? What if the gate slammed shut and that somehow cut them off from the source of their existence from the outside world? I fell into a troubled sleep that night and woke up determined to make sure that these visitors - once strangers and now friends - would remain free to come and go as they pleased. To hell with the neighbors! Not that any of them had seriously objected anyway. Early that morning I found a length of rope in the garage, got in my car, and after reaching the gate, attached it firmly to my car and pulled it down with a loud crash. There was no turning back. I was liberated now! I felt invincible and feisty at the same time; nothing could keep me behind bars any longer, not even by my own hand. Stifling the impulse to drag the gate through the community behind my car, I detached the rope and shoved it off to the side, mute testimony to a momentary act of madness - or was it sanity? - of a dangerously free spirit. As I came back home, the visitors seemed to sense my new-found re-engagement with life and they greeted me warmly. I knew now that they were every much a part of my internal community as I was. In fact, there seemed to be no real difference between myself and them. We were all part of this amazing internal structure I had been carrying around in my heart and head, this gated community safely locked away from the outside and grown predictable and complacent over the years. I was amazed at how this artificial construct colored my life in so many ways, as if I had tried to freeze the vastly ever-changing world itself into a convenient and impermeable idea to hold onto forever. No more gates. Time for the joy of discovery and for taking delight in the mind's unexpected twists and turns on a path that led who knows where. Surrounded by my new friends, I sat down on the grass and felt the warm sunshine of a bright and healing day on my skin. Life is good. I am good. They are good. It is all good. The day held the golden promise of my mind's liberation and I was content at last. The gate was open.

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