The Door Wasn’t the Problem
I learned a lesson at fourteen from a five-gallon water jug.
My mother had asked me to help carry one from the car into our house in Puerto Rico. I hoisted it onto my shoulder and headed toward the front door feeling proud of myself. The jug was heavy, but manageable.
Then I reached the door and realized it was closed.
I called for someone to open it. No answer.
Looking back, the solution was obvious. Put the jug down. Open the door. Pick the jug back up.
Instead, I tried to do both things at once.
As I reached for the doorknob, the jug shifted. My grip disappeared. Five gallons of water spilled across the floor.
I remember trying to explain myself afterward. I had called for help. Nobody had answered.
All of that was true.
But even then, I knew it wasn’t really the point.
Years later, what strikes me is that neither the closed door nor the weight of the jug was the real problem. The problem was my refusal to put the weight down.
For a long time, I thought this was a story about problem solving. The older I get, however, the more interested I am in the question hiding beneath it:
Why is it so difficult to put certain things down?
The water jug was heavy, but that wasn’t what made the situation difficult. What made it difficult was my unwillingness to stop carrying it. At fourteen, setting the jug down felt like admitting I couldn’t handle it. I knew kids my age who seemed stronger than me, kids who, at least in my imagination, could have balanced the jug, opened the door, and walked inside without spilling a drop.
I wanted to be one of those kids, and putting the jug down, even for a moment, felt like admitting I wasn’t.
I suspect many of us continue doing some version of this long after childhood.
To this day, I still see carrying all the groceries into the house in one trip as a completely reasonable goal. Old habits die hard. The things I’m talking about now, however, are heavier than groceries.
The things we carry are different, but the pattern remains remarkably similar. We cling to habits, beliefs, identities, and ways of being that once served us well. Not necessarily because they are still helping us, but because they helped us survive, succeed, or belong at some earlier point in our lives.
Perhaps this is one of the quieter paradoxes of growth. The things that help us navigate one chapter of life are not always the things that help us navigate the next. Yet letting go can feel like a betrayal of our own history. If something helped us survive, succeed, or belong, surely it must still be valuable. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. The challenge lies in knowing the difference.
In moments like those, letting go can feel less like growth and more like ingratitude.
I suspect this is why transitions can feel so difficult. Whether we are changing careers, becoming parents, grieving a loss, beginning a relationship, or reconsidering who we want to be, we often assume the challenge is learning something new. Yet many transitions ask something different of us. Before we can pick up something new, we must first put something old down.
I’ve encountered this more than once in my own life. Leaving Puerto Rico to join the military was one of those moments. Leaving the Air Force years later was another. Neither transition was simply about changing locations or careers. Both required leaving behind familiar versions of home and of myself. Much of what those earlier chapters gave me remains valuable today. But moving forward required recognizing that some things were meant to be carried forward while others needed to be left behind.
That sounds simple until the thing we need to release is woven into our identity.
It is much easier to set down a water jug than the belief that our worth comes from being productive. Much easier to set down groceries than the need to be right. Easier to release a burden than a story about ourselves.
The older I get, the more I wonder whether maturity has less to do with accumulating wisdom and more to do with recognizing which burdens no longer belong to us. We tend to celebrate perseverance, endurance, and resilience, and for good reason. They matter. But there is another form of strength that receives far less attention: the ability to release something when carrying it is no longer serving us.
That lesson was hiding inside a puddle of water on the floor of our home all those years ago.
At fourteen, I thought the story was about a dropped water jug.
Today, I think it is about the strange way even our strengths can become burdens if we are not careful. The very qualities that help us arrive at one chapter of life can make it difficult to enter the next. We become so attached to carrying them that we forget they were meant to serve us, not define us.
Perhaps that is why some thresholds in life feel so difficult to cross. Not because we lack the strength to move forward, but because we are still trying to carry something that belongs to an earlier version of ourselves.
Some thresholds require effort. Others require courage.
A few seem to remain uncrossed until we are willing to set something down.
An Unframed Question
What are you carrying that once served you well, but may no longer be needed for the next chapter?
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Occasional reflections on coaching, leadership, growth, and the stories that shape us.
