The doorways we encounter throughout a lifetime

By Martin Elfert

…you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time [this book] is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. 

– CS Lewis, from the introduction to “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”

Our eldest child, Ami, turned 11 years old this past summer. Eleven is wonderful age and – if my own memories of Grade Six are anything to go by – it is a hard age. One of the things that makes 11 so wonderful and so hard is its “in between-ness” or, to use a three-dollar theological word, its liminality. At 11, the thought crosses your mind that you might not be a child any more. And yet you are surely not an adolescent. At 11, you are exploring what independence might look like, what finding your own voice might sound like. At 11, you are trying to figure out what growing up might mean – not just becoming physically larger, the great project of your first ten years, but getting bigger in ways that are harder to name.

Eleven is a doorway between childhood and something new.

In the days leading up to Christmas, I noticed that Ami had passed through that door entirely – at least for a moment. Like most young people (and maybe like most adults), he looks forward to Christmas morn: to the tree with its lights in the early morning darkness, to the presents that unseen hands have placed beneath it in the night. In Christmases gone by, the thing that Ami anticipated most eagerly was the presents that he would receive – to rattling the boxes and guessing what he would find inside them and tearing off wrapping. It was, in other words, the thought of the gifts coming his way that made it hard to sleep on the night of the 24^th.

This year, for the very first time, what had Ami most excited was not a present that he would receive: what he couldn’t stop thinking about was a present that he would be giving to my wife, Phoebe, and me. The gift, carefully wrapped, was stationed beneath the tree. And, more than once, he dug it out to show it to us and to ask:

Please. Can’t we open it early?

But Phoebe and I held fast: tradition, we told him, demands that presents are for Christmas Day. (I hope that this is not evidence of our cruelty as parents.) And so it was not until Christmas morning that we unwrapped Ami’s gift: a long, beautiful wooden board into which, with the help of his calligrapher friend, Katie, he had carefully burnt the names of everyone in our family, pets included. It read:

Mum, Dad, Ami, Mimi, Timo, Bodhi, Maggie, Abbey. (The final three names belong to our miniature dachshund, our cat, and our guinea pig, respectively.)

Ami’s was just glowing. Something had changed within him.

When I look at Ami’s board, when I hold it in my hands and smell the still-fresh smoke of its letters, I think about all of the doorways, all of the liminal times, that you and I encounter across our lives. Here is the doorway of age 11, the doorway that begins the walk to adulthood. Here as well are the doorways of age 20 and 40 and 70 and (should we live so long) of ninety and beyond. Here at the end, is the final doorway – or, at least, the final doorway that we are able to see.

Here are all of the opportunities that you and I have to risk growing into something a little bigger, a little more generous, a little more joyous. All of the opportunities that you and I have to shift our attention away from what we desire to receive and towards what we might give. All of the opportunities to give ourselves away and, in one of the marvelous paradoxes of this life, to find our freedom in doing so.