A true open-door policy

"An open door is an open invitation." You can read this warning message about leaving doors open on resident advisers' bulletin boards and on commons rooms' doors. It's a good message to heed, I suppose, if you don't want your commons room furniture stolen. But the sign has much wider applicability than that, even though I am sure that housing management, or whoever put it there, only intended to keep everybody's property safe when they affixed it to the door.

An open door is an open invitation, and college is one place where this invitation is extended regularly. Freshman year, I think my roommate and I lived with the door open for the first month or so of school. Everyone was trying to make new friends, and living with the door open was an easy way to do it. People would stop by to talk, and even complete strangers would peek in and start conversations about whatever happened to be going on. When people had their door open, it was easy to just happen into their world and be in the middle of both a conversation and a friendship before I knew it. And sure, that was freshman year. The open doors served the necessary social purpose of helping to facilitate relationships. But the doors don't close after freshman year-not even in those supposedly unfriendly independent dorms, although they may be open less often.

I do not know what it is. I do not understand all the whys of open doors. Maybe it is simply a function of living with too many people and too much stuff in one small room that causes dorm doors to be always open, but I think it is more than that.

It seems to me that open doors are similar to the front porch concept. In my parents' and grandparents' days, people used to sit out on the front porch to watch what was happening, and to see the goings-on as the people in their world passed by. Neighbors knew what everybody else looked like, and were good for at least a smile and a "hey" in passing. Open dorm doors seem to facilitate this kind of casual friendliness between people who live near each other. I think the number of casual acquaintances I have met through studying with my door open rivals that of those I have met while attending social events at college.

And the adventures you can have through open-door encounters are not to be scoffed at. A couple of weeks ago I was walking around someone else's dorm on an errand. I was looking at something on the wall when I heard my name called behind me. I turned around and found out that if I was standing across the hall from a girl I had had a class with. We exchanged greetings, talked a bit, and we both went about our business. Someone in the girl's room started playing guitar and I stopped to listen. She invited me in, and I ended up spending two hours with complete strangers. It would be difficult to find a place other than college where it is this easy to walk into people's lives and their personal spaces and be accepted.

Perhaps open doors are a solution to not living in a home with a family for some students. Maybe the comings and goings of others up and down the hall are comforting to them and remind them that they aren't alone. Maybe some people are just nosy. I can't quite figure out all the whys behind open doors. However, I do know that the best thing about open doors is that when I don't feel like dealing with the world, I can close the invitation.

Heather Morris is a Trinity senior.