Doors

The healthy newborn is greeted by a multitude of open doors, limited only in number by its inherited genes. Soon doors start to close.
By the time the child starts school only a fraction of those doors are still open; though, in most cases, there are still more than enough to facilitate a rich and varied future.
By teenage the choice of open doors to step through has shrunk again and, on reaching early twenties, some of the doors already stepped through have closed behind the individual. Wrong choices lead to more open doors where passing through becomes a matter of survival rather than choice.
For some, the habit of passing through another wrong door to negate the effect of having had a wrong one shut firmly behind them becomes a habit. Choice no longer seems to play its part.
Gradually, the doors diminish and those remaining exist only to enable the individual to continue – until only one door remains and that’s the same for everyone.