How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away

by Emily P. Freeman

Our whole life is like a house, and every commitment, community, role, and relationship is like a room. At some point we’ll find ourselves walking into new rooms, leaving old rooms, being locked out of other rooms, or looking around at familiar rooms and questioning if it’s time to move on.

When something comes into our lives—a doubt, a restlessness, a sense that it’s time to make a change—and we find it difficult to put into words, or we try to express it and are dismissed or ignored, then it makes sense we would begin to outsource our confidence.

Are we becoming more fully ourselves in the process? Or are we working to appease other people and losing ourselves along the way?

When things end, our first assumption may be that something went wrong. But what if, finally, something has gone magnificently right?

It gets tricky, though, when a room where we once belonged isn’t a room for us anymore.

If life were a house, then every room would hold a story. Think of those rooms where you’ve felt most fully, freely, fantastically yourself.

When you look over your life, you can hopefully point to some rooms (or at least corners of rooms) where you have felt most fully yourself, where your mind, heart, and body have felt integrated and aligned. Where you can sit down—not only on the outside but also on the inside—and know you have a place at the table.

Few things can bring about change more effectively than the right question. —J. R. Briggs and Michael E. Smith, Why Ask Questions?

What is my general experience in these rooms? Which rooms are you most drawn to these days? Where do you feel most like yourself? What are the newest rooms or the least familiar? Which rooms are the oldest, the rooms you can navigate with your eyes closed?

if God were visibly, physically in this room, what would God be doing? Saying? Not saying? What would be the look on God’s face? What posture does God have here? What’s held in the sacred silence?

And so the question of leaving or staying in a relationship, in a job, in a vocation, in a volunteer position, at a church, in a particular town or home—these questions are not all created equal. No two people ever have the same decision to make. If you and I are discerning if it’s time for each of us to move across the country, I already have ingrained narratives about what that means. If you’ve lived in the same place your whole life, so do you. We aren’t asking the same questions.

Naturalists love God through the natural world and feel closest to God outside in the midst of creation. Whether it’s the mountains, forest, or ocean, being in nature awakens the naturalist to God’s presence and beauty.

Sensates connect with God through the experience of the senses: beautiful music, compelling art, or even through the simple light or smell of a warm candle.

Ascetics connect with God through meditation, simplicity, or journaling. They are drawn to silence and solitude and tend to avoid what they might call the “trappings of religion and the noise of the outside world.”

What activities, environments, and people draw me to God, to Light, to the Divine? Looking back over your life, consider times when God seemed to be near. What were you doing and who were you with?