Finding a Window of Opportunity When Life Closes a Door

"Why don't you just take a swim?" asked the doctor.

I was in my twenties, having one idea in pursuit of a dance career, visiting a doctor about a violent tendinitis that forced me to leave my place at Juilliard School in New York City.

What the doctor did not realize was that dancing is not just a sport; it is a way of life, an identity.

Telling a young dancer to “take a swim” can be as helpful as telling a woman who is receiving treatment for infertility to “just take a nap.”

Needless to say, I did not follow the doctor's advice. Instead, I spent five good years searching for miraculous healing, from doctor to doctor, from treatment to treatment.

Life went on, I graduated from college, got a job, but in many ways I was stuck. I can't invest in anything else, because I really can start dancing again at any time, and I refuse to do anything that could put that risk at risk.

As a result, I led my life in a painful limbo.

I couldn’t dance, but I couldn’t keep up the difficulty. Dance was like a bad lover who never really cared about me, but kept me on the phone, waiting on the wings, moaning for my life.

Happily, I eventually moved on. It took about five years, but I finally accepted that the job of being a dancer was not on the cards, and even though I had to grieve for this loss, when the fog was gone, I was surprised that my happiness was gone and my dream of becoming a dancer.

Perhaps it was my youthful naiveté that convinced me that dance was the only love I had for myself. Perhaps I was influenced by the false notion, but sadly, it is all too common for each of us to have the soul of one partner all the time.

Whatever the reason, I truly believed that I was burning with one shot of love, and that I was destined to live my whole life poor and black.

(This may sound overwhelming, but remember, I was still in my teens at the time, and young people are often stronger.)

Just a few years later I decided to continue dancing, and soon after I got married, I fell in love with calligraphy and doing things with my hands. Look again, it turned out that I was not limited to a single liking! I developed a love for the arts as I once did dance, even starting a business selling my art.

Then my marriage broke up. During the painful year of my divorce, now that my tendinitis was over, I began to go salsa happily, and I found that sometimes the lost things came back.

Yes, I had lost my dream of a dance career, but it was as if the dance was being brought back to me, in a new way.

Now I had not one, but two passions: art dance and salsa!

The Universe has some bad jokes, however, and as the year went into my salsa mania, new foot injuries erupted. I could not even walk, let alone go out and dance in salsa. Once again, the thing I loved to do was forbidden to me.

But in this case, things were different. This time, I did not sleep with a limbo.

I still have to have my art, for one thing, but I’m not just ready for that. Some friends had taken me to see Teatro Zinzanni in San Francisco on my 34th birthday (think of Cirque du Soleil and a five-course dinner) and I had been introduced by aircraft designers.

I want to do that! ”I thought. And instead of putting the idea on the shelf (as I had many other ideas in my life), I thought, “Heck, why not? If I can dance on the floor, I will dance in the air! ”

They say that when the Universe closes the door, opens the window, I jump into that window! I got a circus school about an hour from there, enrolled in an aerial arts class, and the following year I danced in the air.

What a difference from the first time I lost a dance!

First, I refused to accept the nature of things. I commend my persistence, but I must say it did not lead to happiness.

I have no regrets whatsoever, but sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if, instead of deliberately stopping the way, I would have opened my eyes and looked the other way.

What if, for example, I could get twenty aerial art instead of thirty-four? What if I had opened my mind to the possibility of a completely different interest?

Well, that's exactly what happened in the end anyway.

Eventually the horrific things that happened in my life fertilized some of the rich harvests; I have just spent many sad years at first.

It is not always easy to move forward. It is not always easy to see the windows open by the Universe after closing the door. Processing losses occur in your own time, and cannot be accelerated.

What I have learned, though, is that I am happier when I do my best to keep things simple. When I did the best I could, things always worked out miraculously.

With an open mind (and the amount of freedom of patience and self-awareness), the worst things in my life have been associated with unexpected gold.

It can be hard to keep an open mind when things go wrong, but very happy people do. It’s as challenging as it is, I know it has done me immeasurable good to release my attachment of how I think things should “be”.

This, if you think about it, is the final dance: dancing with Space. Whatever time or type of music it throws at you, our job is to do its best, say yes, and take a spin around the floor.

Is there a place in your life where things have been different for you? How can you turn bad things into your life into a rich harvest?