Opening Doors

A recent class essay assignment started with the prompt "What do you do best?"  

Such a simple, innocent question.  An existential crisis in sheep's clothing!  How do I even begin to answer...???

Well, Odin once said to me - "You have a Hinge Mind.  Apply the right focus in the right place, and the door will swing open."

I feel his trickster aspect most of all in this wisdom.  If you can get creative, look at things from a different angle, place the right bet, make the right deal, maybe sacrifice an eye (or more)... You can move things forward and get what you want.

For many years in my corporate work, I was referred to as "the one who solves problems" or "the master puzzle solver."  Give me the destination, the desired outcome, and I'm confident I can figure out how to get you there and how to get over/around/through whatever barriers might stand in the way.  With enough time and focus, the door swings open, the right answer surfaces in a flash of insight.  Or sometimes I'm just the person who's crazy enough to try knocking on ALL the doors until I find the right one, and taking all those false starts in stride because I know they're just the natural part of the "failure quota" it takes to get to success.  This gift served me well at tech startups, standing on many a frontier and helping answer questions like "what now? where next?"  

More recently I've found it much more rewarding to apply my Hinge Mind to my spiritual community work, and especially doing Grief Recovery Method work with clients who are in need of finding and opening the right doors within themselves to uncover the right knowing, processing, and healing.  I'm privileged to witness so much positive transformation in peoples' lives by helping them confront their grief directly.  Those doors are scary to open, but we co-create a safe and sacred space to open them together, and I do feel that the world is a better place for it.