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

by Emily P. Freeman

Pádraig Ó Tuama, who says, “We might know more than we know we know.”

A life experience cannot be cliché. We bring so much of ourselves into the rooms we enter. And when it’s time to leave, we may leave so much of ourselves behind.

I couldn’t have imagined that nearly one year from that very day, we would walk out of this room for the last time. I couldn’t have imagined willingly leaving a place I loved so much. I couldn’t have imagined then that in order to hold on to my faith, I would have to let go of my church.

But the mistake we make is to assume we’re all in the same room. Physically, this may be true. But there are entire stories and lifetimes that have been lived up to this moment. There are narratives at play and relational challenges at work and memory upon memory running for free just beneath the surface.

Maybe q-u-i-t was the four-letter word you weren’t allowed to say. “We honor our commitments.” “We stay loyal to our word.” Choosing to leave a room may feel like a betrayal, a shame, an option you do not have.

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.

The path only unfolds behind us, our steps themselves laying down the road. —Lynn Ungar, “The Path”

Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote a compelling poem that puts a finer point on this concept: “Caminante, no hay camino,” translated as “Traveler, There Is No Road.” The overarching message of the poem is that the path is made by walking.

As Irish philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch said, “At crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.”3

Without a guidepost, we lose our way.

You might allow other people’s agendas to determine your yes and your no. You’ll be more prone to manipulation, coercion, and doubt. You could lose a sense of grounding, always looking around rather than looking within.

It’s possible to become very successful in a life that doesn’t fit you. It happens all the time. Untapped potential and misaligned success are just two sides of the same coin.

You cannot be formed inside someone else’s life. You have to live your own life.

Can we be misled by desire? Yes. But can we also be misled by avoiding, fearing, or bypassing desire? Also yes.

Perhaps a helpful thing to remember about desire is this: knowing and naming what you want is not the same as forcing or demanding what you want. Demanding a desire be met is a form of aggression. Naming a desire you have is an honest confession.

I was having an honest confession that was taken as agressive and that is okay. How others react does not reflect me, but something in them.

Or as Parker Palmer puts it in Let Your Life Speak: “Before I can tell my life what I intend to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”7

Changing our mind can feel like being in a burning house and finally opening the front door, escaping into fresh air. And it’s such a relief, until you realize the very thing that saved you sent the room you left straight up in flames. Just because something burns doesn’t mean you did the wrong thing by opening the door. At the same time, not all fires are created equal, and just because you feel the flame doesn’t mean something has gone terribly wrong or even that you’re in danger.

I walked out of the room for a minute, but the hallway I found myself in was filled with too many questions and not enough answers. And so I chose what felt like certainty over what I anticipated to be a free fall of curiosity and disconnection and loss.

I couldn’t avoid conflict just to keep the peace that was really no peace at all. Because now I was brought near. Now this wasn’t a distant issue to consider or an impersonal problem to solve; this was people I respected and cared about.

When it comes to changing our minds, proximity is a most compelling companion: proximity to people, to their pain, and to the God who loves us all.

For the purpose of our continued conversation, here’s what we’re talking about when we say “hallway.” A hallway is a place of permission. It’s a space where you’re allowed, compelled even, to ask your questions, perhaps the kinds of questions that your rooms haven’t allowed. It’s a space to try on possibilities and to reimagine what could be.

We may stay in certain hallways for decades. Sometimes the hallway is the best we can do. Sometimes the hallway becomes a room all its own. And we gather with the misfits and the I-don’t-know-yets, and all those who are leaving rooms but don’t yet know where to go.

Love this

So while a hallway may be right for now, what I don’t want to do is hang back in the hallway when I know it’s time to walk into a room. What I don’t want to do is stay in a room to avoid a hallway. What I don’t want to do is linger too long on either side of the threshold in fear.

We learn through pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you’ll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you’ll see at least one next right step you can take. —Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow

Does staying draw me nearer to God and to people or further from God and people? Does leaving bring me closer into alignment with my personal core values or further away? To what degree? For how long? What’s at stake (for me and the community) if I stay? What will I or the community lose if I leave?

I suppose the question then for you, as it was for us, becomes whether or not the rooms you’re in allow for safe dialogue, wrestling, and community. Are you in a place where you feel able to disagree? Are the voices in the margins welcome at the table? Are you able to trust that God is big enough to hold it all?

The strange thing was that I was the one leaving, but the reality of my experience was I felt like the one who had been abandoned, like someone packed up all the comfortable chairs and blew out all the candles, taking with them the wax and the wicks. I wanted someone to talk to but didn’t have a clue where to turn. We were leaving, but we felt left.

Something new was rising up in me, next to the fear and the doubt. It was fortitude. It was courage. It was a challenge to move forward in love even with my questions. I would not have said this then, at the time. But I can see it now, looking back, the way God moved not only through people but also through pictures informed by what I knew about the life of Jesus in the Gospel accounts.

First, there was the idea of a table. N. T. Wright says this: “When Jesus wanted to explain to his followers what his death would mean, he didn’t give them a theory. He gave them a meal.”

So many of us have had lasts we didn’t know were lasts, either because of those pandemic years or because of other unexpected circumstances outside of our control. This can be one reason it’s difficult to move on.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, And the norms and notions of what “just is” Isn’t always justice.

There is a difference between the peace that comes from doing the deeply right thing and the relief that comes from avoiding discomfort.

True peace is not the absence of discomfort or conflict. True peace is an inner okay-ness and wholeness. True peace is an alignment with what we know and what we do, living in congruence with our personal core values, our true identity, the common good, and our life with God.

and we knew our reasons had less to do with one person or group of people and more to do

with a whole system.

I just knew I couldn’t leave and move on to something new in freedom until we at least tried to articulate why we were leaving. And so we decided to write a letter.

But we didn’t say any of that. We had enough evidence to know that this was not a place that would be able to do that for us, at least not in our experience.

Who would receive us? Where could we go? Was there any place to belong? We felt so desperately alone.

There are some people who leave early, and others who have a tendency to overstay, and I am an overstayer of the most extreme kind and have lived that way for most of my life. One of the most central learnings of midlife is learning how to let go. —Shauna Niequist, I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet