Respect The Closed Doors

Every so often, I see someone argue that travel is a colonial practice. There’s truth in this critique, but I worry that our awareness of inequality can become a way of protecting ourselves from having to see our own place within it.

Ideally, travel means going to places where people may rightly be suspicious of you, and discovering, in the midst of that mistrust, something deeper than your comfortable self-image.

An American friend of mine moved to Colombia after a crisis following the birth of his son. He wanted to study the teachings of the indigenous Kogui people, particularly their system of spiritual mathematics. He asked their elders if they'd teach him. “Absolutely not,” they said. “You’re not one of us.”

He stayed anyway. He lived alongside the Kogui, helped with their daily projects and repairs, and absorbed a great deal of wisdom without ever being granted the access he wanted.

It’s a useful story for our age, when we often imagine that AI and other technologies have thrown open the doors of knowledge. First of all, they haven't. AI, for example, continues a pattern familiar from colonialism: uprooting and ultimately replacing local understandings.

More importantly, wisdom is often found at closed doors. The places where you want answers and are denied them. The places that ask you to stay without getting what you came for.

Where are you facing a closed door right now? Sometimes it’s a person who won’t love you the way you need to be loved. Sometimes it’s a pattern you can’t stop repeating. Sometimes it’s someone's death, the ultimate closed door, leaving conversations forever unfinished.

You can try to force these doors open with easy explanations and premature conclusions. Or you can sit outside the closed door and discover what it has to teach you.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.