I have lived long enough to realize - not conceptually, but as lived experience, and more than once, both professionally and personally - that doors that refused to open have often led me to better ones, sometimes far beyond my wildest imagination. In short, this has consistently been redirection rather than rejection.
The most striking professional redirection occurred when all my applications for academic positions in areas not closely aligned with my PhD specialization were rejected for ten years. This continued until I was invited by one of the leading scholars in my own field of expertise, who had also become my academic mentor after my PhD supervisor passed away prematurely, to teach at the very department where I later worked.
I remain deeply indebted not only to her but also to that institution for having enabled me to live without financial worries and to pursue my academic interests for sixteen years, even though I ultimately decided to leave both the institution and my professional occupation in languages and linguistics full ten years before the official age of retirement.
The most unforgettable personal redirection was how my totally unexpected and sudden divorce eventually turned out to be a blessing - indeed, blessings - in disguise. Please don't misunderstand me. This doesn't mean that I wanted to get divorced. On the contrary, I did everything imaginable to save the marriage, albeit in vain.
With hindsight, I'm even grateful to her for her courageous decision to leave me because I could not have been liberated otherwise from the prison of my egoic mind - a prison that caused incessant headaches not only to her but also to many others around me. I don't believe she intended to do me any favor with her decision. Nevertheless, the outcome was exactly that.
In light of these two experiences, as well as several earlier and less dramatic ones, I was able to remain serene when I encountered yet another series of closed doors during a three-month challenge program involving four other challengers and our respective supporters.
By the end of that program at the end of December, all four of the other challengers attained the goal prescribed by the program. I did not. Yet it was precisely through this apparent "failure" that I was redirected toward something utterly unimaginable to all of us, myself included. The door that finally opened for me at the very end rendered that original goal completely irrelevant.
Ultimately, those earlier redirections are what led me to this very challenge program in the first place, and that program, in turn, led me to this unimaginable door. In other words, closed doors at different stages and in different contexts of my life seem, so to speak, to have conspired with one another.