Life is filled with moments when and where a door opens. That happened to me, and it seems to have been fortuitous.

You don’t know where that path leads if you walk through, as it’s all shadows and you can’t see the final destination. All you have is intuition and an internal compass pointing you forward. We also have moments when you enter a door and, well, you have calamity too—and many also don’t get to walk through doors because of the “chains of life,” as the Ghost Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol” so poignantly reminds us. In short, you can never be sure. I think the trick is recognizing when you hear sirens singing, as the Greek oracles and global myths show us.

I was lucky. Also, I felt I had a fictional spirit guide, Bogart’s cynical Rick Blaine in “Casablanca,” reminding me our petty little problems in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans. But his tiny little story also reminded me that it’s best to plan ahead if you need to get on that plane to Lisbon to escape the dark tides that are rising. You don’t really escape. You put yourself in a better place to be “in the fight,” as his accidental buddy Victor Laszlo keeps reminding him.