Dismantling

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Over the past year or so, I have watched in awe how construction workers were dismantling an aging office building nestled against an intersection of two freeways.
At first it seemed they were just going to do some ~ extensive ~ maintenance work on the outside of the building. But as time progressed, more and more of the original building disappeared, until finally only the bare structure of the building was left standing; just the floors and the roof…
It looked kind of sad dismantled like that, not in any way the building it once was.
Then they started rebuilding it.
Having the opportunity to recreate that same building into a new ‘incarnation’ of itself, it now meets all the demands of this point in time, and has become a much more useful space than it was in its old existence.
And now, whenever I drive past it on the freeway, it looks truly beautiful.

In a sense, when we set out to reinvent ourselves we follow the same process. First we strip away those parts of ourselves ~ of our lives ~ that are no longer useful to us. We dismantle ourselves. Throw away the old clothes; the old shoes ~ and also the old habits, attitudes, and thoughts that have defined us for so long ~ and we go back to the core of ourselves. And with only the core of ourselves left standing, we start rebuilding ourselves…
We start reinventing ourselves in order to meet the demands of this point in time; this point in our lives. We build ourselves back up in the most fun and productive way we can imagine.

The difference comes when we are called upon to dismantle that which someone else has spend so much time and effort building. For instance, when an elderly relative moves into a care home and his or her earthly possessions need to be dismantled from a full size family dwelling into a one-room-efficiency-apartment. Often, a lot of the things that carry the best memories won’t fit in the allotted space and have to go. Making it so much more difficult for that person to take that next step; the reinventing and rebuilding his- or herself.
It is a painful process that is often handled logically and matter-of-factly, so we can get it over quickly.

And then there is the process of dismantling the life of someone who has chosen to reinvent and rebuild themselves in that other plane where no earthly possessions are needed…
Suddenly it is no longer their process, it is ours.

And how we handle it says a lot about how we are handling the dismantling, reinventing, and rebuilding of ourselves…
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