The Sliding Door Moments That Make Things Super Hard Sometimes

Photo by Jon Stebbe on Unsplash

I was watching a committee in our town government where they were voting on budget recommendations and one man, an elected official, looking pretty exhausted, said more than once when it was his turn to vote, “I don’t care.”

This broke my heart because I know this guy is absolutely the type of guy who cares about a lot of things and in big, passionate ways, but the optics of that statement, that exhaustion, wasn’t good.

A little earlier, at another meeting, a bunch of elected officials decided not to televise a workshop. They’d be able to talk more freely was one of the reasons cited, being able to work in a certain room was another. Public could still attend, but it wouldn’t be on Zoom or streamed.

Those moments didn’t seem like a big deal to either of those groups involved, but they were huge deals to some other people in our community. They were tiny moments where trust was whittled down.

I kind of think of them as sliding door moments.

Full confession time: I’ve never heard of the term “sliding door moment” until today.

Have you?

If you haven’t, here’s a quick refresher from Ashley Fetters’ “I Think About This a Lot: The Sliding Doors in Sliding Doors.”

“In 1998, writer-director Peter Howitt incepted a whole generation with this recurring-nightmare-fantasy scenario, by way of the romantic comedy Sliding Doors. An examination of how tiny, seemingly inconsequential moments can alter the trajectories of our lives, Sliding Doors is a perfectly light, frothy rom-com that improbably shoves you down into a bottomless funk of self-doubt right after the credits.”

I didn’t watch a lot of romcoms or Gwenyth Paltrow movies then so that’s my excuse, but, since its origin, the term’s meaning has expanded a bit.

The Gottman Institute on the Huffington Post wrote,

“Sliding door moments are the seemingly inconsequential everyday moments filled with the words we haphazardly throw back and forth at each other, accompanied by little evanescent pains, frustrations, joys, and laughter, flying through our minds and our hearts, that make or break the most important relationships in our…