To find the answers, you must open all the doors

Let me tell you a story I once heard being at guests to friends. They told it as a laugh, but…

One famous Russian actor told how at the dawn of his fame he went on one of his first tours. Abroad. Hotel. The night administrator gave the room key. The room was tiny: a bed, a wardrobe, a bathroom.

But the actor thought that everything is fine: yesterday’s student, he still did not feel like a star. He also had almost no things. Therefore, everything was in order. One thing was bad: there were no windows. But that was OK too.

The tour lasted a week. All week he left early and returned late. Each time, the hotel staff looked at him with interest. Once, he encountered a maid when leaving. She began to wave her hands, said: “Big! Big! ”, But he modestly dropped his eyes and fled, whispering “Thank you ”. He did not know English yet.

On the day of departure, he called the receptionist and the maid to the room – so that they would be checked that he had not stolen hangers and slippers. They knocked, smiled, entered.

And then an amazing thing happened: the receptionist opened the cabinet doors and … entered it. It turned out that all week the actor lived in the hallway of a huge luxury room with panoramic windows. And he didn’t know!

It could never have crossed his mind that he deserved something more than this hallway. He slept on a narrow couch, designed to change shoes, and his two sweaters did not even hang in a closet. What for? They don’t wrinkle.

The actor sat and laughed. And then he cried. He regretted the lost opportunity to live in comfort and laughed at his expectations. He did not know that he deserved more. He did not know that one should always want more than fate gives.

When I heard this story, I thought about how many of us live in the hallway of life, and I don’t even suspect that the whole world, the whole of Narnia, huge panoramic windows are nearby, right behind the doors. We are not looking, we are not opening the doors, we are satisfied in advance with what we have.

We don’t know what we really want. And we do not try to search. Passively sail, taking the gifts of fate. But we can strive to the dream, we can blow up the sails and catch the wind. It is possible, being grateful for what we have, to search for our “more” anyway.

Life is a quest. To find the answers we need to open all the doors. The key is surely waiting for us behind one of them. And that will be the key to some next door. Which has yet to be found…

© Fortune, 2020