What may remain from an earlier life without forcing us to keep living in it.
Behind an old door from my former life, my fruit grows today.
It is a waiting-room door from my dental practice. Patients once walked through it. Some in pain, some afraid, some merely hoping to get out again quickly. The door belonged to a life of appointments, responsibility, staff, technology and a profession I practised successfully for many years.
Today it stands in Calabria.
No patients wait behind it now. Oranges, lemons and peaches grow there. They ripen quietly in the sun, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a German practice door to end up guarding a Calabrian fruit store.
The door has not lost its purpose. It has simply been given another one.
Perhaps the same is true of people.
A new life does not always begin by throwing everything old away. Some things may come with us. Not as monuments and not as burdens, but as material. A table becomes a workbench. A cupboard becomes storage. A door suddenly protects something for which there was no room at all in the former life.
I did not have to destroy the past in order to begin again. I only had to decide what it was still allowed to carry today.
The door reminds me where I came from. But it does not force me to go back there.
Today it protects my fruit.
Today I protect my life.
Behind it ripens what I harvest. In front of it ripens what I have become.
