In CS Lewis’s famous tale. ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are sent to live with an eccentric professor in order to avoid the bombing of London during the Second World War. His house is large and rambling with a seemingly endless number of staircases, corridors and rooms. Exploring the house on their first day they stumble across an upstairs bedroom, entirely empty apart from a large wardrobe. Peter, the eldest of the children, takes one look and remarks, ‘Nothing there!’ and walks away; but Lucy, the youngest, stays behind because, as Lewis writes it, ‘she thought it would be worth trying the door of the wardrobe.’
In life some of us are like Peter and some of us are like Lucy. There are those of us who look at the world that we see, and are happy to conclude that there is no more to life than ‘this’. After all a wardrobe is obviously just a wardrobe. But then there are those of us who look at the world and wonder whether there might be something more. Who knows what we might discover if, like Lucy, we were prepared to open the doors of our hearts and minds and keep exploring.