Walls

Walls are interesting things, serving a plethora of purposes.

Walls can promote order and categorize. Walls can protect. Walls can support weight. Walls can define boundaries or unite a cause, stretch across a vast continent and protect an empire. Walls can restrain the incoming waves of the sea and safeguard against the winds of a storm.

We mark height on them as we grow as kids and then post the minutia of our lives on digital walls we come into our own. Classic love stories have been told to thousands utilizing a chink in a wall and thousands of prayers are offered and placed in the cracks of a wall.

If only these walls could talk, what stories they would tell.

Walls can also hide secrets. Walls can isolate, divide and contain. A wall can imprison half a country of people struggling and screaming for freedom. Walls are used to detain and impede forward progress as well as segregate and obstruct a movement of people and their combined will.

We can be driven up walls in crazy fits of annoyance or punch holes in them out of futility in our anger or extreme despair.

But walls can fall, either by circling armies of trumpeting heavenly hosts, thousands of protestors chanting the time has come, or a solitary individual chipping away one piece at a time. Walls are built to be climbed and overcome, eventually to crumble into bits destined either for museums or to be forgotten in the dust.

With that exposition said, I invite you to join me as I begin a series exploring some of the walls in my life. From what they are to how they got there, physical, mental and emotional walls surround me and, for the most part, have defined my life.

So let me leave you with this thought, best said by American novelist Bernard Malamud:

“There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go, if there are no doors or windows, he must walk through a wall.”