The Dragon and the Door

There is an old parable about a dragon and a door I think about often.

Walking through the door is easy. It is as simple as turning the knob and putting one foot in front of the other.

However, that door sits at the tip of a mountain, guarded by unknowable terrors, booby traps, and magic.

It will take all your cunning to navigate the path. You will need armor and weapons. Even then, the odds you will survive are minuscule.

You will face obstacles that work to break you, and ones that would surely destroy the person you are today…

…but if you defeat the dragon at the top of the mountain, they will drop a key, and then walking through the door is easy.

I think about this every time I have success doing something, because every single time, it felt impossible. I had to remold myself into a different human than I was and fight like the dickens in order to gain an inch.

I faced things I thought would break me, and frankly, they did break me. They wretched me apart more times than I can count, and I had to reforge myself with every rending of my soul into something new.

Some of those things I abandoned. They weren’t worth the fight. I accepted, for instance, that I will likely never direct any more movies. That mountain was not worth the sacrifice to me, but it might be for you.

Others, like writing books and making comics, I worked and worked and worked at for years. I fought every battle, and it molded me into something different than I was before; a better version of myself; one that could easily summit that mountain.

Eventually, I did reach the summit and walked through the door a success. Every time I thought to myself “wow, that was easy. What was I so worried about all this time?”

But it wasn’t easy. It’s just that I had defeated every obstacle to get there.

Of course, when I walked through that door, all I found was another mountain to climb, but that’s a parable for another day.