“I wish for more doors to open for you than to close or stay closed.”

I love middle age. At this point in life, I have accumulated enough experience to have earned real expertise, solid street cred in my domains of study and work. And yet, there is still plenty of ‘runway’ to do cool shit! That’s assuming I don’t drop dead tomorrow, of course. But even this, the keen and escalating awareness of my own mortality, makes my potential feel that much more exciting and acute.

I have had conversations with multiple friends about this lately. Many of us, especially in medicine, have lived what I would call a social norm-driven life: College, med school, residency, practice/research/academics, leadership. Date, marry, have kids. Launch kids into the same social norm-driven life. Color inside the lines, even if it’s not totally our nature–often not even noticing or questioning whether it’s our nature or not. Huh. Not good enough anymore, I think.

So much emerges now about the vastly, truly wide diversity of human nature, such as gender and sexual fluidity, psychology, physiology, and sociology. Narrow social norms taken for granted by generations, at least in the Western, ‘developed’ world, dissolve and disintegrate under scrutiny exponentially faster, it seems. It feels understandably scary in so many ways, for so many people. We have never been here before, never faced this much newness of both magnitude and volume, in the history of humanity. Anything new is uncertain, daunting. This much new is mind bending. I think we can figure it out, though, just like humans always have. If we can practice effective self-awareness, self-regulation, and communication in the face of high anxiety about the unknown, great things could ensue… though this is a great, big collective ask.

…So, what is this super cool shit any/each of us can do, whether we have lived a mainstream life thus far or not? As Mary Oliver wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Some of us hear the Knock–a call, a whisper–to do something different, something new, something heretofore unimagined. For me it’s Book (well, I have imagined it for nine years, but hey, some of us also move slowly). For others it may be leaving an office job, exploring new creative outlets, pursuing long hidden or newly emergent dreams. Regardless, there is energy here. I have described it as pushing outward, broadening myself against the walls of a box within which I had not noticed I lived until now. The status quo feels newly small, constraining, unsatisfying. What I understood previously as black or white, open or closed, good or bad, right or wrong, feels ever less clearly dichotomous. Not only do I now perceive the gray, I feel pulled toward it. Touching it, experiencing it, feels liberating, expansive, an existential education that I could only think to seek by having lived this long a certain way.

The call, however, can come with no shortage of ambivalence, even conflict. For those who live with underlying depression or anxiety, this tension between the relative safety and security of the status quo and the freedom and exhilaration of answering the Knock may exacerbate symptoms significantly. When questioning my friend on the phone today about how she feels in her body when imagining the new thing, she could hardly attain, let alone stay in that sensation. Rather, her mind skipped ahead to potential negative outcomes, focusing on uncertainty and risk, bypassing said freedom and excitement. The status quo confines her, body, mind, and spirit; she feels it. Her dissatisfaction with it grows, causing agitation. I could also feel the tumult in her voice, like a roiling swirl of motion without movement, a frenetic vibration seeking resonance. I could only sit with her, from a thousand miles away, holding space. I could relate, help just by validating, even though I could not solve.

At the end of our call, I thought of the door analogy. Trying new things does not have to be all or nothing. We can go slow. There may be many doors to the new place to consider. We can check each for heat, sounds, vibrations from the other side, see which are un/locked. We can turn knobs and open slowly, peeking inside, possibly anticipate what we may find. We can back out quietly, leave it, come back later. No need to kick any doors in, potentially hurting others on the other side or causing recoil that slams ourselves in the face. We can examine potential costs, benefits, intended and unintended outcomes. And we can trust ourselves to handle whatever results from our deliberate and thoughtful decisions and actions. We can be mindful, intentional, honest, and authentic. This way, we will have less to regret, no matter what happens.

The Knock is Possibility. It is a signal of hope, light, and growth, both an uplift and a deepening. Sometimes we hear it only briefly before other sounds drown it out. When it recurs, however, I advocate for listening, following, finding its origin. We are only here for a short time. Fear and anxiety can be overcome; we can find our way to brave, new, big, wonderful things. There is no rush. And it’s probably better if we go together.