The Door I Never Knocked On

I was tempted to knock.

I'm not the kind of person who gets invited in. I don't have the right surname, nor have I ever excelled at anything that couldn't easily be dismissed as noise or vanity. The circumstances of my birth were such that very few would have bet on me ending up where I am today.

Everything seemed to conspire toward my failure: the family I was born into, the human outskirts in which I grew up, a personality that was reserved in some ways and excessive in others. The rest was my own doing. I was never truly a friend to anyone—not even to myself whenever I mistook wishful thinking for genuine goals.

Realistic goals become visible only when the center of the compass is steady. Only then do we know the widest arc we can draw with the pencil at its other end. Without that fixed center, every project risks becoming little more than fantasy.

Yet I kept moving forward without a square, without an apron, without a trowel, and without a plumb line. I moved instinctively, like a river finding its course wherever gravity allowed the water to flow, never really knowing where it would eventually lead.

That is why I thought about knocking on a certain door.

Only later did I understand that the most important work is always an individual one. In the corridors of life, we speak far more to ourselves than to anyone else. We ask questions of ourselves far more often than we ask them of others, trying to make the best use of the cards that fate has placed in our hands.

Shortcuts? Networks? Preferential treatment? Memberships? Recommendations?

Perhaps all of that would have made sense if I could go back twenty-five years. Even then, I suspect I would eventually have discovered that what we call synchronicity is often nothing more than chance, and that our fortunate moment may arrive regardless of the lodge, the association, or the committee we happen to belong to.

And besides, what does it really mean to reach the top?

Far better to pursue clear, attainable goals from the place where we actually stand, knowing that every destination reached simply becomes the starting point for the next journey.

Esotericism has never truly interested me. To my eyes, it is often just a more refined and elegant way of building symbolic systems that, all too easily, drift away from reality—much like ideologies and religions do whenever they stop inviting people to question themselves and begin asking only for belief.

There has always been only one smorfia—my own.

Everything else is just noise.