Perhaps the time has come to tear down that wall.

You know the one. It's been around for quite a while, but you have dim memories of times before it was there. There was a room back there, full of... something.

You don't even remember what was in it, much less what it looked like. Now you think you might want to find out. And you're tired of having people ask why there seems to be this room in your house, sealed away.

Where do you start? Taking down a wall is not a small thing. It keeps things sealed away, yes, but it also holds things up. Have you built your house so that you need this wall to keep it up? If so, well, you'll need to rebuild. Build pillars, to keep the ceiling up, or take down the things you've built that depend so heavily on that wall - that wall that keeps things sealed away that, no matter what you might once have thought, really aren't best forgotten.

I'm not going to lie to you, to make you think this will be easy. It will not be easy.

Taking down any kind of wall is never easy. But this one, in particular, may be important to you. You may have painted and decorated it with pictures and pretty things, maybe put your television in front of it. You'll need to redecorate. But you'll have more space to put things. Will you make use of that space, or will it sit there, empty because you didn't have anything to fill it up with?

So you've decided to go ahead with this. Don't do it carelessly. Don't think you can just take a hammer and start smashing. You could do a lot of damage that way.

Take it one brick at a time. Chip away at the mortar. You may have trouble with this first brick. You've grown to like this wall. But it will be worth it. If you need to stop working on it, do so. But don't cover up the work you've done. Leave it, so that people can see that you are trying to free up that room. Some of them may offer to help you. Let them. If they are your friends, they cannot hurt, and some of them may have taken down, or are considering taking down, walls very much like your own. They can help.

And once you get that first brick out, you can poke a flashlight in and see all the things you've been missing, and all the space you've been without. Chances are, you'll see no reason not to finish the job, once you finish that first brick.

So finish. It can be over quickly, or it can take a long time. But when you're finished, you can go in and clean up, and it will be the most enjoyable cleaning up you'll ever do.

Making this place beautiful, this place whose existence you had almost forgotten, sorting through the things you had trapped inside it and putting them in their proper places, will be the only reward you need for the difficult task of taking down the wall that had them confined. But there will be more rewards; the space will be there for the rest of your life, and you may do with it what you will. And your house will be that much more complete.