The Door, The World

Swooning in adoration of a beautiful girl from his village, a boy abandoned his father's house.
Loitering by the front door of the girl's villa, the boy bowed to her father at the entryway, and, seeing through it the girl smile radiantly at him from an atrium balcony, asked permission of her father to court her.
The girl's father scoffed, replying, "Boy, you have no family, no money, nor even yet hair on your face!"
Then the girl's father stepped out onto the front stoop of his villa, and, reaching back, slammed the entry door shut behind him.
The boy's last glimpse of the object of his infatuation was of wide eyes and a red mouth -- shaped, just like his, into a large, surprised "O."
Disconsolate, the boy hung his head, and pleaded to her father, "Now what do I have, sir, without her?"
The father laughed uproariously, and, reaching out to clap the small lad on the shoulder, turned him about-face, picked him up into the air, and tossed him into the street.
As the boy thumped to earth in a billowing cloud of dust, he heard a merry voice reply, "You've the rest of the world, lad!"
Thus, when one door closes, the rest of the world remains. -- via Parker Palmer

September 21, 2013, excerpt from The Parables of Reason © 2007-2013 (Chapter 2, "Assumption's Denial"), by Frank H. Burton, Executive Director, The Circle of Reason.

Aphorism of the Week

Don't exist in the past. Don't exist in the future. Exist now.

Dedicated in admonishment of the U.S. House of Representatives' insistence on returning to a past where the Affordable Care Act did not exist -- and, in attempting so, to injure America's economic health and future.