Discovery

The light is warm and inviting. During the day, there is sunlight that floods the room. At night it is warm and comfortable.

The room is filled with your favorite books, the right furniture, a kitchen, a soft bed, everything you need. It would be easy to spend all your days here — and indeed you have, comforted by the familiarity of the space.

Until one day, in tracing the lines of the walls, your fingers find a crack in the wall that reveals itself to be a door. You lean into it, and it opens into a hallway, elaborate and large. You don’t even stop to grab a flashlight.

There is artwork lining walls, a greenhouse flooded with sun, a ballroom with tall chandeliers. Beyond those, more rooms, some dark, some light, some empty, some filled with treasures.

And you realize that you’ve been living in this mansion all along, but only in one room.

That’s where I found myself this week, realizing that I had been living in one room of myself.

For the sake of metaphors, we’ll call it the Study. It’s where all the logical workings of business and finance and life have been happening for me. And while it has its own wonders, it’s become stifling and small. I’ve outgrown it.

The depth of who I am is much more daring and expansive. There are rooms I still have not discovered. But there is light and comfort, there is the seduction of candlelight and captivating scent of foreign flowers, there is darkness and wonder and mystery. There are hidden passageways and forgotten places waiting to be discovered. And even though I know it all, I am exploring and running the halls, laughing.

Where are you living?