I mention thresholds on here a lot not because I believe buy into the monomyth of Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (on Amazon), but rather because I believe great stories and great changes in life all involve thresholds. Literal thresholds are also crossed in every single fantasy/fairy story that’s ever been written. Tolkien talks about these in On Fairy Stories, but when Kiddo and I went on a morning run the other day,  I mentioned Lewis.

Of course.

What else would I be thinking about at 6 in the morning?

In The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis compares this attic space connecting every townhouse in the row to the wood between the worlds. He talks about how kids always find these spaces, these in-between spaces that cross a threshold from their world into a world completely foreign. We cross these thresholds all the time as kids, learning and growing from other worlds, and the world seems magical. I’ve made it my ambition, as an adult, to find these wherever I can, to go looking for them, to cross thresholds into other worlds and grow — “childlike” is the word.

“Look,” I said on our cool-down walk. “A threshold.” There was a tiny rock path hidden behind a fire pit in this lady’s backyard that crossed a creek, ascended a hill through a wood and landed on that railway-turned-trail where we walked.

“It is,” she said. “Huh.”

“I bet some kid loves crossing that backyard world into the world of this trail.”

Kiddo responded days later by sending me the picture above, a picture that was posted August 8th on Humans of New York. Brandon, owner of HONY, added this text with the picture:

“I think our memories of childhood are composed of these magical play spaces that children have. Does that make sense? The places that, as children, we sort of claim and carve out as our own. I think we lose that in adulthood. Does that make sense?”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Well, I moved around a lot. So I had a lot of different ones. But I remember the back balcony of our place in California. There were plants out there, and I used to get on the ground between those plants and play with my toys. It was my space.”

“Do you remember the saddest day of your life?”

“I lost a sister.”

“How old was she?”

“She was eight. I was twenty at the time.”

“What’s the greatest day you ever spent together?”

“I remember this one time we were walking in Pennsylvania, and she was really young so I was a long way ahead of her. And she stopped and kept calling for me to come back. I finally walked back to her and she was pointing down this narrow alleyway– it was blocked off by this wrought iron gate and lined with trees and paved in cobblestone, and the light was coming through just perfectly. It was very beautiful. And I just loved how she’d noticed it and stopped me from my busyness to appreciate it.”

“It was one of her spaces.”

“Yeah, I guess it was.”

Go cross a threshold today and come alive.