A while back, we (my coaching business) won a contract to coach 175 leaders of a huge government agency. It was worth a great deal of money — the kind of number that rearranges your whole year or more. Then a new administration came in, and the thing quietly evaporated before it ever began.
A few months later I said to my wife, in full tears, "thank God I didn't get that." The tears weren't grief.
Picture the actual, day-to-day reality of that contract. Soft and spiritual me, coaching the executive team of a very hard-nosed agency. The bureaucracy, the red tape, the meetings about the meetings. I'd have to put on the heaviest suit of armor I've ever worn, every single morning, for years, in order to pretend I could take it off.
My ego mourned the money and the prestige for about a week. The quieter part of me wept with relief, because it wasn't going to have to spend the next decade in a room it never belonged in.
I've started to notice this is usually how it goes. The thing I was sure I wanted falls through, and only much later do I see that the falling-through was the gift — the closed door was the most direct route out of a life I'd have had to survive rather than live. I'm wary of spinning that into a law about closed doors and open windows; mostly things just are what they are. But every so often you notice you dodged a giant bullet and some part of you knows it before you do.