Canessa and Nando had been walking blind for four days through the snow of the high Andes, skin ulcerated, bone poking bone, their food and their hope running out, knowing their imminent death would mean death for the fourteen back in the fuselage. Nando had buried his sister and mother in the snow and seeing his father’s face again was the sole thing keeping him alive. To climb out of this valley of death back to the living. But they were lost, their own bodies were eating them alive, and Canessa sat down in the snow to die.

Many years later he said of the experience:

There will come a moment when you think you can’t go any further, when you’re done for. When you want to give up. All you have to do is take one more step. And you will see that doors will appear in walls you didn’t know existed. And you can walk through them.

*

I had a teacher at art school who was very into magic, sometimes at the beginning or the end of a lesson he would show us something. He told us there are five different reactions to a magic trick. The first is a plain lack of interest. The second looks on reluctantly. The third wants to work out the mechanics of the trick. The fourth is smiling in admiration of the magician, the fifth is wide-eyed in amazement in the presence of magic.


I remember thinking how cool it would be to make the first feel like the fifth. To be a magician, I thought, you have to believe in magic. In its power. I wondered if a lifelong study of magic would impart a different way of seeing the world, a mystical one, or if it would do the opposite. As if it would remove the magic from things. I asked myself which one I was, I hoped I was the fifth.

Two years ago I read this thing which said take a step back from yourself and look at the things that make you feel happy, and the things that make you unhappy, and try to do more of the good stuff, and less of the other stuff. It was a time when I felt like dark forces were governing me but I lacked the perspicacity to give them any shape or form, and the line resonated inside me like a sounding gong. Nothing I had seen had hammered home an idea so simply and so searingly, I felt flooded by something clear and good.


As the demons of my bad habits leered at me I resolved to mark the moment, and tattooed the date onto my arm, backwards, so I could see it when I looked in the mirror. When I went running in the early morning I would stop by water and kiss my arm and a strange feeling would wash over me. I remembered saying to a friend once that everyone carried a large degree of self-loathing inside them. Looking concerned as if what he was about to tell me would be hard for me to hear, he replied: I don’t think that’s true mate. But kissing my right arm in the light of the early morning by the water, I felt like what was washing into me was its opposite, something like self-love.


Now in early December I go and celebrate my new birthday. Me and myself go out for a drink and have a think about things and raise a toast to one another. Fuck it, I thought, I can even call it my rebirth day. I’m two years old now. I resolved not to tell anyone.

*

A new year is upon us now. It’s the middle of January and we’re renewing friendships and joining gyms and full of fire because the new year brings change. Look at us shedding all our dead wood, closing the door on the previous year and opening the door to a new one. Taking a look at ourselves from a distance. What makes us happy. What makes us sad. Doing more of the good stuff.


I didn’t make any resolutions this year. I thought I’d concern myself with more of the same, the daily struggle not to fuck up. Wake up on time, be a good person, be involved in the world, buy fairy liquid, try to write something important, exercise, read good things. Try not to dwell on how strange things are or how lost. Walk through doors.


That’s the other thing my teacher said that I’ve always remembered. Walk through doors, he said. He didn’t elaborate, he just said those three words and smiled. I thought about it a lot. What sort of doors. Which ones. And I realised doors are everywhere around me. Invisible doors in walls I didn’t know existed, waiting for me to walk through them.

I didn’t know at the time that the date on my arm would become a daily reminder to do the things I know make me happy, a contract written in ink with myself to stop doing the things that don’t. And to keep the struggle close, to think about the day itself and not much more.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself, each day has enough trouble of its own.

I wonder what today will bring.

*

Forsaking resolutions for the new year for a resolution for a new day. When my day threatens to go south I’ll look for a door. Somewhere close by there is a door, the other side of which is the next best thing. Playing the snakes and ladders of each day, two steps forward, three steps back, winning some and losing some, feeling out with hands for invisible walls, reaching out for doors.