CREATE, DESTROY, CREATE. WITH AWARENESS
Lawrence Toye - 11 November 2020
To begin
I have fond memories of building sandcastles at the beach as a child. Looking back at those times as an adult, I observe some profound truths about a young human’s ability to regularly accept impermanence and overcome disappointment. This gets me thinking about how this attitude can often change when we grow into adults...
A short journey
When building a sandcastle at the beach, there’s a few considerations to be made.
There’s;
The tools: bucket and spade
The materials: sand (and shells for decoration if you’re elaborate)
The time frame: “how long are the family going to sunbathe for?”
Then there’s all sorts of testing to be done for the correct kind of sand; too sticky or too dry and it doesn’t slide out in the perfect shape of the bucket. You do a few testers and before you know it you’ve built a ramshackle village of sand shapes and are considering where to build the moat and the main gate to the castle.
The hours pass, there’s now not only shells but also seaweed and driftwood in use to mark out green spaces and make roofs for the huts. A dog came and kicked up a corner of your sand-village chasing his ball, but you rebuilt it just the way it was before.
This could truly be your best sandcastle ever!
As the sun hovers lower in the afternoon sky, you realise that it’s almost time to go home. Observing your sandcastle kingdom with a sense of accomplishment and invincibility you say, “this city for the crabs shall forever remain on this beach and henceforth be known as…” just as you’re about to officially name your masterpiece, that silent and formidable enemy to all sandcastles rolls up the beach behind you. With one smooth action, the foaming tidal swell picks up half your day’s work and carries it into the ocean.
You’re stunned. Unsure of what to do. There’s not much you can do. All that effort and imagination, your best work, washed away in an instant. It was so PERFECT...
After a moment of dismay, you realise something. You still have your bucket and spade, a whole beach worth of sand and multiple designs for your sand-kingdom to go home and draw before your next visit to the beach. There’s probably way better places to put the castle anyway!
The moral?
Children have a capacity to recognise and accept the impermanence of things and overcome disappointment, something which adults can often lose touch with.
When we, as adults, have experiences of watching the things we have created begin to crumble, our grip on protecting them can often increase. We’ve invested energy and time in creating them and it’s “just so unfair” that they should ever have to be destroyed! It’s difficult to move on.
Some other key lessons
What could there be to learn from accepting that the deconstruction of what we have spent time building is an inevitable part of a cyclical process?
i) Letting go of the result, when the time is right, leaves less room for disappointment
ii) The realisation that things work in cycles means that we can be confident of most likely arriving at the moment where it’s time to “build the next sandcastle” again
iii) There’s so much more learning available when we can be fully present to each moment of every part of a process, without getting stuck on or worrying about one particular step
Furthermore there’s a beautiful opportunity to tease apart the many components that came together in the maturation of an idea to identify which of them is useful and which can be let go. A certain flexibility of attitude and thinking is required here. Along with the practice of relinquishing attachment, to all things, not just those that are convenient.
“Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat. If your daughter is not impermanent, she cannot grow up to become a woman. Then your grandchildren would never manifest. So instead of complaining about impermanence, we should say, “Warm welcome and long live impermanence.” We should be happy. When we see the miracle of impermanence, our sadness and suffering will pass.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh)
Are you as curious about these juicy topics as we are?
Click here for YES&’s Digital Event | 2020 Edition - Honouring Chaos and Possibility. Through a collective dialogue, using an Integral framework, we will be honouring our recent challenges and lessons and navigating whatever is next, with openness, spontaneity and resilience.