Professional artists Gloria Ing and Graciela Rodriguez will join about 200 middle and high schoolers on Main Street on March 3 to turn the pedestrian mall into a living, collaborative dream.
Greetings, gatekeepers and code breakers! Last week, we explored the impracticality of passwords – opening doors to our locked email accounts, Airbnb getaway, or forgotten versions of ourselves. Perhaps you invented a club with an impossible-to-pronounce entry word. Maybe you rewrote your own internal login credentials so you don’t have to reset your password ever again. If you found yourself thinking more carefully about what deserves protection and what deserves sharing, then the password did its job.
Our next creative nudge is less about what gets you through the door and more about door mechanics; our nudge this week is a hinge. Not the glamorous part of the door. The hinge hides in plain sight, screwed into place, doing the humble work of allowing movement. It only gets your attention when it’s in bad shape. All that open, close, repeat business wears down this true team player.
I don’t think much about hinges until one starts failing. A high-pitched squeal from the bathroom door at three am reminds everyone in the house that it’s time to buy some WD40. A squeaky front gate can give you time to pretend you are not home before a solicitor approaches. But the sounds they make are the least interesting things about hinges.
Take a moment to look at one. A door hinge. A cabinet hinge. The hinge on a jewelry box or an old patio storage box. Notice the basic design: two plates joined by a pin, allowing rotation without collapse. Strength paired with flexibility. Stability partnered with motion.
We hinge on decisions. A conversation hinges on a single word. In stories, a plot can hinge on a letter never delivered or a train missed by seconds. Every swinging saloon door in every Western ever filmed owes its drama to a hinge.
Even our bodies hinge—elbows, knees, jaws—bending in one direction to make movement possible. They teach us that flexibility is not weakness. It is necessary engineering; nobody wants to go through life unhinged!
Let’s take several minutes right now to appreciate hinges - literal and figurative - with one or more of these multi-sensory nudges:
Squeak & Spell: Slowly open and close a hinged door. Is it silent, smooth, squeaky, rhythmic? Record the sound on your phone and loop it. Build a tiny soundscape around it; add a hum, a whisper, a drumbeat on the table. Write a short poem using only verbs that describe the hinge’s movement. Where in your life do you hear resistance before you see it?
Pivot Point: Sketch the hinge itself. Zoom in. Draw only the screws. Or only the negative space between hinge plates. If drawing isn’t your thing, photograph the hinge from unusual angles—below, above, extreme close-up. What does that wear pattern say about use? About repetition? Create a pun heavy title that does not fit behind a hashtag.
Swing Your Partner: Stand upright and move like a hinge. Keep one part of your body stable while another swings. Explore slow, deliberate bending at the waist or knees. Notice how your balance shifts. Choreograph a 60-second “hinge dance” that exaggerates opening and closing.
Hinge Sentence: Write a single sentence that could change the direction of a story—or a life. It might begin with: “Everything changed when…” or “If you open this…” Let that sentence become the hinge upon which a short story, poem, or personal reflection swings open to the reader.
Hinges remind us to oil what squeaks and loosen what’s stuck. Honor the quiet hardware holding it all together. Somewhere in your day, something is about to turn. A little attention in the right place can change the entire arc of your story.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT 5.2, used as a creative collaborator in my ongoing exploration of how humans can stay human in an era of unprecedented technological change.
