Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
There is a saying that has survived centuries of human suffering, which tells you less about the wisdom of the saying and more about humanity’s stunning capacity to repeat things that sound good on a magnet or repeated aloud with some sort of self-satisfaction.
“When God closes one door, he opens another.”
People say this at funerals, at breakups, at layoffs, in hospital waiting rooms, in the comments section of posts by people who have clearly been through something and do not need your refrigerator poetry right now.
I said a version of it this morning while putzing around my kitchen.
“When God closes a cupboard,” I announced to no one, “he needs to go get some paprika.”
I was looking for paprika. I did not find it. I am an atheist, so technically the paprika’s location is nobody’s fault but my own, which is actually more annoying.
The Divine Is Great at Beginnings (Allegedly)
Here is the premise of the original saying, for those of you who have somehow avoided every Hallmark movie and grief counselor in America: God, or fate, or the universe, or whatever sentient force you have decided is personally managing your life between its other responsibilities, closes one door. This is the bad part. The job ends, the relationship implodes, the diagnosis comes back wrong. Door closed. Very sad.
But then, and this is the inspirational pivot, another door opens! Somewhere! The exact location of this door is never specified, which you would think would be a problem but apparently isn’t, because people have been reciting this saying for hundreds of years without anyone raising their hand to ask for a map.
The thing that nobody mentions is the part in the middle, which is where you actually live.
The Hallway No One Puts on a Throw Pillow
Between the closed door and the allegedly opening one, there is a hallway. The hallway is not in the saying. The hallway does not fit on a coffee mug. The hallway is the part where you stand around in the dark wondering if the whole door-opening thing is just something people say, the way they say “everything happens for a reason” or “he’s in a better place” or “the first year is the hardest,” all of which are sentences that have been weaponized against grieving people by well-meaning idiots since the dawn of language.
The hallway is eight months of job applications answered with silence so complete you start to wonder if you have become a ghost.
The hallway is the apartment you didn’t plan on, eating cereal at a table that was supposed to seat four, watching television at a volume that fills space the way water fills a hole.
The hallway is the version of yourself you have to rebuild from scratch because the old blueprint turned out to be load-bearing bullshit.
There is no saying for the hallway. There is no magnet. If you want to make one, it would read: “When God closes one door, he opens another, but first you will stand in a lightless corridor for an indeterminate period questioning your choices, your worth, and the fundamental nature of cause and effect.” Probably won’t fit on a throw pillow, but at least it’s honest. All though, that much embroidering is going to give you carpal tunnel.
When There Is Only One Door
Now. Here is where the saying doesn’t just fail — it actively earns a little contempt.
Sometimes there is only one door.
Not every situation is a hallway lined with options, waiting for you to find the right one like some inspirational escape room. Some situations are a room with one door, and that door closes, and you are standing in the dark with four walls and no exit and someone very sincerely telling you that God has a plan.
When there is only one door and God closes it, God is kind of a dick.
Not a cartoon villain. Not mustache-twirling, lightning-bolt-throwing, flood-sending (well, okay, there was that one time). Just the ordinary, ambient dickishness of a force that presents itself as benevolent and omnipotent but cannot apparently be bothered to install a second door before closing the first one. A basic building-code violation. A cosmic fire hazard.
The one-door problem is where the saying collapses completely, and where you can see the seams of the whole enterprise. Because “God has a plan” only works as comfort if you trust the planner, and the planner’s track record, if you look at it honestly, is a little uneven. Inspiring, yes. Occasionally magnificent. Also: the appendix, the platypus, and a frankly excessive amount of childhood cancer. The portfolio has notes.
I am not saying there is no God (okay, maybe I am a little). I am saying that if there is one, the door metaphor suggests a project manager who is winging it.
The Paprika Is Not a Metaphor. Well. It’s a Little Bit of a Metaphor.
I did find the paprika. It was behind the cumin, which had been relocated during a reorganization effort that made sense to whoever did it and made no sense upon return. This is also, I think, the actual version of the inspirational saying.
Not that God opens doors. Just that things are generally somewhere. Not always where you expect. Not always when you need them. Not arranged according to any logic you were consulted about or would have approved. But somewhere. Behind the cumin. In the apartment you didn’t plan on. In the version of yourself that comes after the version you lost.
You don’t need a door metaphor for this. You don’t need a plan, divine or otherwise. You just need to keep opening cabinets until you find what you’re looking for, and to resist, as best you can, the urge to thank anyone in particular when you do. If you need more unsolicited kitchen philosophy, there is plenty more where this came from.
The paprika was always there.
I found it myself.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
- The King Is Leaving Now. The Deer Is Not Doing Well. - April 15, 2026
- The Nobody Gets Away Café - April 13, 2026
