How true does this sentence feel to you?
Life has a rather questionable sense of humor.
It brings you into the world naked, confused, and screaming—which, come to think of it, is more or less how many of us arrive at forty—then hands you a fistful of keys and deliberately forgets to tell you which fucking doors they open.
You’re on your own, champ.
This photograph shows an old key pushed into an even older lock. Worn metal, scratches, dirt, marks left by time and probably by someone who, at least once, tried to open that door in too much of a hurry.
And looking at it, I found myself thinking that maybe this is exactly what we are.
Locks damaged by every previous attempt.
Keys we stubbornly keep trying.
Doors with what we imagine is finally the answer we’ve been searching for all our lives waiting behind them.
I, at least, spent a long time that way.
Looking for the right lock.
The one for the right job.
The right woman.
The right place.
The right life.
The famous “purpose”—that wonderfully grandiose word we use to lend a cosmic air to the fact that, most of the time, we haven’t the faintest fucking idea what we’re doing.
Because it would be nice, wouldn’t it?
To wake up one morning and find a fucking letter from the universe on your nightstand:
Dear Sir, we have finally processed your application. Your purpose in life is as follows. Instructions, GPS coordinates, and free parking are enclosed. Sincerely, God.
Very professional.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
No one tells you which door to open.
And, above all, no one warns you that some of the keys you grip the hardest will be the very ones that open nothing.
There will be people you’ll try to find your way into.
Projects you’ll hand months or years of your life to.
Places that will feel like home.
Ideas you’ll defend the way a drunken idiot defends the last cigarette in the pack.
And sometimes you’ll feel that tiny movement inside the lock.
Click.
And you’ll think: this is it.
Finally.
Then you push the door open and discover that the future wasn’t waiting behind it.
It was just another room.
Welcome to adulthood.
Admission is free; purchase required.
The funny thing is, we spend an enormous part of our lives trying to open doors that may never even have been ours.
Because someone told us happiness was waiting behind them.
Study.
Work.
Produce.
Earn.
Buy.
Mate.
Reproduce.
Climb the ladder.
Buy a bigger house so you have somewhere to put more things you never needed to buy.
Smile for the Christmas picture.
Die, preferably without causing too much administrative inconvenience.
A flawless screenplay.
Five stars on LinkedIn.
Too bad that every now and then someone gets that irritating little question:
“Yeah, okay… but what the fuck am I doing here?”
And that’s when the real trouble begins.
Because once you truly start asking, certain doors suddenly stop looking quite so interesting.
Maybe that’s also why I’ve always needed photography, art, travel, roads taken without knowing exactly where they led, passions capable of devouring a few hours without asking permission.
Not because I’d found the answer.
I wish.
But because, at least while I had a camera in my hands, I felt I was trying a key that genuinely belonged to me.
And in life, that is no small difference.
Then there are people.
Ah, people.
The hardware department of hell.
We spend years trying to figure out what combination might open someone up.
We say the right things.
The wrong ones.
The right ones at the wrong time.
We fall in love.
We fall out of it.
We come back.
We run.
We forgive things we swore we’d never forgive and lose our shit over nonsense we couldn’t even remember three months later.
Every now and then, someone gets in.
For real.
For a few days, a few months, a few years.
And when it happens, it’s magnificent and terrifying at once, because you suddenly realize that all those locks you built to keep the world out worked perfectly.
Until someone found the key.
Then maybe they leave.
And that’s when you discover another charming detail about life: people can leave and take a copy of the keys with them.
So every now and then, years later, all it takes is a song, a smell, a photograph, a street you happen down, and that old door opens again.
Without knocking.
Son of a bitch.
But maybe the point isn’t to find one key that opens everything.
Maybe that’s just one more con we sell ourselves because we need to believe there is some final answer.
There isn’t.
I don’t believe there is a morning when you suddenly understand it all.
Who you are.
What you’re supposed to do.
Who you’re supposed to love.
Where you’re supposed to live.
What mythical purpose got you hurled onto this planet in the first place.
You probably keep figuring it out as you live.
One piece at a time.
One door at a time.
Sometimes walking into the right place.
Many more times walking into the wrong room, looking around, and thinking:
“Ah. Perfect. Another brilliant fucking decision.”
And yet those matter too.
Because a scratched-up lock tells a story.
It tells of every attempt.
The wrong keys.
The hurry.
The shaking hands.
The times someone pushed too hard.
And maybe that’s exactly where we became interesting too—in the scratches.
Not in the flawless parts.
Those are good for Instagram.
It’s the marks left by trying that tell the real story of a life.
So this old key—I like to think of it this way.
Not as the key to happiness.
Not the key to success.
Not even the key to love, truth, or any other word important enough to be printed on a motivational mug.
It’s simply a key.
A possibility.
And maybe that’s all we have.
Try.
Turn.
Feel whether something moves.
Know when to persist and when to have enough dignity to pull out that fucking key and look for another door.
Because maybe the secret isn’t managing to open them all.
Maybe the secret is getting good enough to recognize the ones still worth trying.
And to keep trying even after we’ve scraped our hands raw.
Even after a few doors have been slammed in our faces.
Even when we’re no longer twenty and no one has yet explained precisely where we’re going.
I, at least, am still here.
With a few keys in my pocket.
A few ruined locks.
An embarrassing number of wrong doors behind me.
And that stubborn sense that somewhere, there is still one worth opening.
I don’t know what’s behind it.
But maybe that’s exactly why I keep turning the key.