Construction 🚧

Construction is the first of three phases in our lives (construction, deconstruction, & reconstruction). It is the period when we first formulate our first ideas of the world, based off of the environments we grow up in, and the things we are taught.

As a child, much of our life is constructed for us. Our experiences are narrow, and our cognitive functioning is not fully developed. Reasoning is difficult. We often cannot grasp ambiguous problems, so we look for simple black and white solutions.

As a result, we often oversimplify complex questions down to misconstrued, all encompassing answers. At the time, this suits our needs. We needed an answer to something that was unclear, so we constructed a simple solution that would satisfy.

The problem is that as we grow older, we change. Our circumstances change, and the oversimplified answers that once seemed to suffice, if we’re not careful, stand as barriers between growth and being stagnant.

Some of us hold so tightly to what we learned in our construction phase as children, that we don’t allow ourselves to reformulate or ‘reconstruct’ our ideas as an adult. This leads to a feeling of being stuck, enslavement, bitterness, anger, frustration, and a wide array of other emotions.

That was me. I was that person. I was stuck so deeply in religious dogma I’d learned as a child, that I didn’t give myself any freedom to navigate the world as an adult. I felt tremendous fear, shame, and pain in trying to make any decisions outside of the rigid guidelines I’d learned. I also felt like I was way behind where I was ‘supposed to be’ (whatever that means). I had to give myself grace and freedom to take risks and break free of rules driven by fear.

Maybe it takes a lifetime to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘reconstruct’ what we learn in childhood. It takes a lifetime of questioning, reasoning, growth, and action. I think Picasso may have been referencing the phases of ‘constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing,’ when he said, “It took me four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.”

Give yourself grace, and give yourself time. We are always growing, and we are always changing. The world isn’t perfect, and neither are we.