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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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This Is the Door summary
Darcey Steinke
The Body, Pain, and Faith
Brief summary
This Is the Door examines the interplay between identity and desire, guiding us through a journey of introspection. Through personal narratives, it encourages self-discovery and challenges conventional perceptions of self and society.
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This Is the Door
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Key idea 1 of 6
The spine that holds us
Your spine started aging before you were old enough to notice. Deterioration begins by 23 – and by 60, most people will have experienced back pain at least once. It’s one of the oldest taxes the body pays for being human.
To understand why, you have to go back much further than you might expect. Our earliest ancestors weren’t even vertebrates. Ancient predatory fish, some stretching seven feet long with heads the size of basketballs, drove smaller creatures out of the water and onto land. Over millions of years, those creatures adapted to their new environment. Wrists evolved to push bodies up from muddy banks. Spinal discs developed to bear weight against gravity. The spine we carry today is the long, improbable product of that transition – an evolutionary solution that made life on land possible, but never quite perfected it.
The spine is what philosopher Thomas Moynihan called a ledger of traumatisms – a record of everything evolution cost us. When we moved from four legs to two, the lumbar region took on a load it was never quite designed to hold. Some theorists argue we made that shift so our hands would be free to gather food and fight. Others propose something more romantic: that early humans stood upright to bring their heads closer to the stars. Whatever the reason, philosopher Immanuel Kant believed our dominance as a species came directly from that upright posture – which means our ascendancy and our susceptibility to back pain arrived together.
The nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi knew this intimately. Born with scoliosis, he spent his life in anguish, hunched over a desk, his body a constant argument against the position he was forced to hold. Pain turned his gaze upward – to the stars above his childhood home, which he wrote about with a longing that was as physical as it was spiritual. They consoled him. They offered company in a suffering that felt otherwise unreachable by language.
Pain resists language almost by design. When a body is injured, nerve fibers signal to cells in the spine, which pass the message upward to the brain – not to a single pain center, as scientists once believed, but to multiple regions at once, including those involved in emotion, memory, and decision-making. Pain’s never just sensation. It’s also everything you remember, everything you fear, and everything you imagine might come next.
The author discovered this firsthand when a spinal disc herniated, pressing on the nerve root and sending pain cascading down her hip and leg. Time seemed to stop. She could neither accept the pain nor escape it. She describes feeling like a marionette with a severed cord – the lower half of her body dangling, disconnected, from the rest.
Swimming became her one refuge, returning her body to the element it had evolved from. On land, she was an improvised creature, bound to gravity and carrying the evolutionary cost of standing upright. In the water, briefly, she was free. Her suffering revealed something easy to forget: the spine that made us human was never a perfect design. It's a compromise – one that gave us the ability to stand tall, but also ensured we'd feel the cost of doing so.
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What is This Is the Door about?
This Is the Door (2025) is an exploration of physical pain and what it reveals about the human condition. Drawing on personal experience, neuroscience, philosophy, and spiritual tradition, it examines how suffering reshapes identity, empathy, and the way we move through the world. It argues that pain – however unwanted – can open us to a deeper understanding of our own bodies, our connections to others, and the fragility and wonder of being alive.
Who should read This Is the Door?
- Individuals navigating chronic pain, illness, or physical limitation
- Those drawn to the intersection of science, spirituality, and the body
- Anyone who has felt suffering change them, and wants to understand how pain can reshape identity
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