When we built our church facility back in 1999,
our general contractor installed industrial-quality, Corbin Russwin automatic
door closers on every door in the place. These things are fascinating. When you
push on a door to open it, there is resistance because that action is forcing a
plunger into a cylinder, compressing the air inside it. Energy from your body is
being transferred in some mysterious way to the cylinder, which then holds that
energy in a potential form. When you let go of the door, the plunger is forced
out of the cylinder, which then closes the door by means of a system of
connected rods.
Here’s another way to think about it: because
the cylinder makes the door harder to open, you are forced to use additional
energy to open it, but that energy is then stored and used to close the door
automatically when you let go of it.
The whole thing is quite clever.
These heavy-duty, door closing units are pretty
sophisticated and cost about $100 each. We have 20 doors in our building, so we
have about $2000 invested in automatic door closing, which is a pity since as it
turns out, only the external doors and the restroom doors have any need for this
luxury. In fact, a door that always closes automatically can be a
pain-in-the-ass. I got tired of trying to hold doors open with my rear end when
my hands were full of boxes or books or whatever.
So a few months after we moved into our
building, I arrived one morning with 20 door-holding-open machines, commonly
known as stoppers. These particular stoppers are metal pegs with rubber feet.
You attach them to the bottom of the door. Then you can flip the peg down with
your foot when you want to prop the door open. They were $11 a piece.
As I understand it, the stoppers increase the
inertia of the door to a point where the air pressure in the cylinder is not
sufficient to close it. But that’s just fancy talk. They keep the doors open;
that’s the important thing.
And so it was that we came to this ridiculous
place: on the top of each door is a $100 machine that converts human energy into
potential energy that is constantly pushing against the door, wanting to close
it. At the bottom of each door is a simpler, but no less effective, $11 machine
that makes the door so hard to close that the top machine is unable to do the
job it was designed for and for which we paid good money for it to do.

It was four years before I saw this absurdity
for what it was. It hit me like a flash of enlightenment one summer day while I
was looking at one of the doors. Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes and I saw
things as they were. I laughed out loud at the sight of a $100 door closer
straining as hard as it could to close a door held open by an $11 stopper.
“This is insane,” I said to myself. “All of
this work, worry, and energy serves to create a state of affairs that we could
have had if we had never installed closers or stoppers at all. We have set
energy against inertia, all to maintain a kind of doorway deadlock. We could
have had immobility if we had done nothing at all.”
I got up from my chair and wandered around the
church, looking at all the door closers and their corresponding stoppers. One of
these doors, the door to the kitchen, had been held open since the previous
summer. I think I was the last one to open it, which means that energy from the
breakfast taco I had that morning ended up being stored inside this cylinder for
more than a year.
I reached up and touched the cylinder. For some
reason I expected it to be warm. Warm from the exertion of pushing against a
door for a solid year. But of course the energy inside is potential. It’s
somehow real but not real until the door is released. Don’t you think that when
the air whooshed out of the cylinder, it should have smelled like tacos?
It didn’t, but that would have been cool,
right?
I decided to do something about
this situation. I brought my drill to church along with a set of screwdriver
bits. I removed 6 or 7 screws and took down the Corbin Russwin door closing
machine. Then I knelt and removed the four screws holding the door stopper in
place. Once liberated from these opposing forces, the kitchen door swung easily
on its hinges. I can now open the door with one finger. I can move it to any
position between open and closed and there it sits happily until someone moves
it. I’m working with inertia now, instead of fighting against it.
It’s an amazingly efficient way to do things.
The only thing more absurd than the whole
situation was how excited I was about the newly liberated door. I had to tell
the very next person who came down the hall.
“Hey, check this out.”
I swung the door open and shut.
“Open, shut, or anywhere in between. The door
does whatever I want. Isn’t that cool?”
I don’t remember who it was, but she was
understandably perplexed by my enthusiasm. Come to think of it, she might have
been this woman who left the church around that time. She probably had the idea
that the pastor should be working on sermons or visiting the sick or something
like that instead of doing junior physics experiments with the door hardware.
And I must admit, she’s probably right. Thank goodness I’m alone at the church
most of the time so nobody knows what the hell I’m up to.
Anyway, this whole thing with doors got me
thinking that deadlock is such a tiring way to stand still and do nothing. All
of that straining and grunting. Losing a little ground, then gritting your teeth
and pushing harder against whatever force is opposing you.
But we humans love to grapple. We like to lock
arms and growl and push each other around. We like the feeling of one force
moving another. We like power, and we like to use power. And if you look around
the world, a lot of things that appear to be stationary are not moving because
they are pushing hard against something that is immovable. You see this all the
time. Especially at family reunions.
We set power against power and force against
inertia. It’s what we like to do. We move things around our world and it makes
us so happy. And there are times when force and power and moving things around
is the right thing. There are times for that.
But there are also times when it is so much
better to stop pushing against things and let them be. There are times when the
doors should swing freely. Let them be open or closed. Just let them be. There
are times to walk gently on our planet and see if it is possible that you pass
on your way and leave not one stone overturned or one tender branch bent.
There are times.

Times to get out of the way and let people
or plants grow as they will.
Times to let go of someone and allow them
to live their life for better or for worse.
Times to sit quietly around the fire with
mother myth and all the other earth children. Just listen to the story,
child. Let it be.
Times to let the children eat when they are
hungry and go to bed when they are sleepy. Perhaps not every night, but
there are times.
There are these times. And if you can learn
to see them and embrace them, you will begin to develop the soul of an
artist and a saint.

rlp