The nature of things

A slightly breezy June morning, the sun trying to find its way around and through the light cloud cover, the trees dancing in time to the music in the wind – everything is green again and it seems like maybe we’re safe to say it will soon be summer.  The evenings are still cool but the mid-day sun is packing a punch of refreshing warmth that will later intensify to the point where we may dare to call it too hot, but after the winter we experienced, we’ll take our chances.  And so it’s June, school here is almost done for another year and I’ve been gone from here too long, busy with changes again.

Or maybe still.  The changes this time around are many and at times have overlapped to the point where we’ve been forced to just accept life is lived inside a construction site some times, and I’m grateful that no one has plotted a mutiny, not that anyone could blame them – but still, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve been spared this long only because they need me around to finish the job…

Change for the sake of change is what this appears to those on the outside, enlarging the kitchen by way of relocating the stairs and walls that originally kept this house a series of distinct rooms, each with a singular purpose, connected yet still apart.  A few weeks of coordinated demolition took care of that, and after careful reconstruction we have the bones of a unified space that flows between areas, allowing light and air to circulate and for us to be everywhere and nowhere all at once.  I was looking at old pictures of the house from when we bought it 19 years ago, and save for 3 original doorway locations, it doesn’t resemble it’s former self in any respect.  By the time I finish this project, there will not be any space we haven’t touched, altered, refined or relocated. 

I’m reminded of that philosophical question all first-year students are asked to consider: if you take your brand-new car and replace it piece by piece with new and identical parts – at what point does it cease to be the same car?  Or does it remain the same regardless?  From the street, from the aerial view, and from almost every vantage point inside this building, it is not the same house it was before it became ours.  But yet it is and always will be. Gradual changes do not seem to reduce the nature of things, though we know on some level that things are not what they were, not different, not the same.

And so it is with us – like the car in that philosophy question, physically we have undergone many complete changes of the basic building blocks of human existence as our cells die and get replaced, yet we are still who we were, just older perhaps, age and growth of course alter appearances, but the underlying you-ness remains.  Mentally though I’m not sure the comparison remains valid, as this seems to be the area in which we can more easily measure larger changes over time, and where it seems more likely you could argue that we do not remain that which we were.  We age and we grow, but we’re still us.  Same, but different. 

And so it is with the house, to those of us who see the changes day by day and who will experience the results of those changes for years to come, that this round of changes is not just for the sake of change but has been planned and designed to increase our enjoyment and efficiency of our time here, mindful of what we had and what we endured along the way inside these walls, all the while maintaining the history of the structure in balance with the new additions. 

Bigger, more useful spaces offset by reductions in areas that create more intimate spaces.  Growth and alterations that remove signs of age yet will, in time, show their age.  Postponing the inevitable perhaps. Different, but same.

Like Spring now turning into Summer, life is all about changes.  Many small, gradual ones that over time amount to something bigger and more noticeable, like the bare trees, which are now green.  The petals from the blossoms have fallen, about to be replaced with fruit; the flowers busy bursting with color and texture.  The grass grows high and we mow it down to size to keep it manageable.  Exams are being written, and soon the school doors will be thrown open and the kids will be free for a few months to forget what they learned over the previous ten, until they return in the Fall.

It’s June.  And we’re talking changes.  Constant, natural, evident ones in the trees and flowers on the outside, and for some of us deliberate, planned, and sometimes less obvious ones on the inside.  Both types move us forward closer to our goals, further to the ultimate design and when the dust settles long enough for us to see things clearly, it’s obvious that we are all really just carpenters in this lifetime, each of us building lives as we go. Hopefully we finish the job before our deadline.