Destruction & Creation

I wrote this a while back and it has just been sitting there in my drafts folder ever since. I came back to delete it, but before I did, I read it again. Now, I’ve published it for you to read too because I think this does contain some points worthy of consideration.
I’m interested to find out what you think.

My thoughts this week have centered a lot around the processes of destruction and creation. When I was at school, I remember someone saying to me that when you destroy something, you are also creating at the same time. It captured my imagination then as a teenager and it still does now as an adult.

Before I go on, I will be very clear that I am not talking about actions which will harm another person or oneself. I am wholeheartedly against any form of non-consensual violence against living beings and property.

The truth of it, however, is that I don’t see this idea in the same light anymore. I used to romanticise it. I thought that it was a wonderful thing and that destruction almost inevitably led to the creation of something better. Now, I appreciate more nuance in it. I appreciate the importance of positive intention and deliberate action in ensuring something positive comes out of any act of destruction.

If you take a wooden table and single-mindedly destroy it with no thought of anything else, you will soon be left looking at a pile of broken wooden shards. They can’t be used for anything else. However it’s a different matter if you decide that the table top could be used in another way - maybe as a shove ha’penny board - and decide to detach the legs, cut the top down to an appropriate size then shape and design it appropriately. You have still destroyed the table. Yet you have also created something which can be used and enjoyed in the process.

This approach is observable in the realms of social issues and politics. Before undesirable policies, laws and social attitudes can be torn down, people need to take positive, deliberate action to create something better. Take the Black Lives Matter and Racial Equality movements that are going on as an example. Positive intentions fuelling deliberate action are needed before the social attitudes, policies and laws will actually be changed in a meaningful way.

We can use this approach in our individual circumstances too.

How can this be used to improve someone’s mental health and happiness?

When we get clear on what the problem is (because it’s so much easier to identify what’s wrong), we can use that to explore possible solutions. The positive intention here is to feel better and the deliberate action it fuels is exploring different solutions.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of finding that one or two of our options don’t fix everything and then declare that “nothing helps”. This is where we need to keep the positive intention alive and well in our very core. With that firing us up, we will keep going until we find the right thing or, as is so often the case, the right combination of things to get us what we want. To get us to the point of “feeling better”.

This process involves tweaking or redesigning things that are already there. It’s a lot easier and more feasible to proactively adjust how we think/feel about or respond to a certain thing rather than to try to tear down our thought patterns with no plan of what to do instead and just hope that the result will be better. In fact if we were to just tear everything down without a plan, we would probably be in a worse state than when we started!

We need to create before we destroy.

Take control of your life and have a chat with me about how I can help you harness the power of destruction & creation!