SLIDING DOORS THAT CLOSE, IS IT DESTINY ?

Dahlia Tera

In recent days, I happened to see on an English language Chanel, a film called ‘Sliding Doors’.

It is a 1998 US movie made by the director Peter Howitt with leading actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

The film is gripping, holding in suspense and it is, more than a story, a reflection about the possible destinies of a person, about the role of destiny in our choices, about the inner powerful desire to live many lives, always hanging, as we are, by a thread, for the better and for the worse.

The story:

Helen arrives late at the office and is fired. She decides to go home early but when she arrives at the subway, the story is doubled:

There is Helen who misses the train and is attacked.
There is also Helen who manages to get on the subway.
Two destinies open up, in a split second.

Reflections the day after:

Each individual has innumerable potentialities within himself. If the old peasant, as a young man, had emigrated to a big city, he could have become an entrepreneur; the girl who destroyed herself with the drug addict could have become a happy mother; the famous scientist, a great musician. At each stage of life, we make choices, we decide to play a certain role, we become a definite person. (Even if actually, this ‘definite person’, with the Covid 19 pandemic and its consequences has flown away a bit…!)

Anyway, we have to decide because we wouldn’t even know who we are.

However, whatever way we take, in the depths of our soul, the tumult of possibilities continues to stir.

Goethe’s Faust does not just want to be young again, but to live many lives; in fact, he becomes a leader, marries Helen and has a whirlwind of experiences.

In daily life, there are those who appease this desire for multiplicity by accepting new challenges, those who are constantly making trips (when we could!!), those with amorous adventures or even just by participating in the experiences of others through novels or cinema, gossips.

All human beings are divided between the contradictory desire to be oneself only and, at the same time, different.

Then tension is created: sometimes the desire for stability prevails, the pleasure of living with people you know, with safe habits and rules; sometimes instead, the desire of the new, of the change, of other lives.

When we are engaged in the effort to strengthen our identity, we look with distrust all those who have chosen the path of adventure and excess until we too would like to walk that path; because when we impose ourselves or it is imposed us a too rigid schema, the uproarious tumult of what we could have been, makes us feel everyday life like a cage. And we want to open the window, attracted by the chaotic and messy vision and reality of existence, fascinated by its many amazing forms.

And sometimes, the tension is so strong that it leads to a kind of rupture. Then, there are those who leave a secure job for the entrepreneur’s risk, who throws themselves into political life, who has a religious conversion.

And the stiffer the armor that had imposed itself with self-discipline, the more the break can become ‘explosive’.

We all have to choose and be rigorous.

However:

Let’s accept our complexity,
Let’s try to understand the imponderable,
Let’s respect a part of destiny when it knocks on the door with awful or wonderful unexpected surprises,
Let’s open the gifts’ box of the life,
Let’s ‘the doors slide.’

VERITAS ALICUBI INTER says a Latin proverb ‘the truth lies in between’, because finding one’s inner balance gives great strength, serenity and positivity.