Why I chose the name “rebuilding” for this blog

Union Beach home after Hurricane Sandy,
NJ's most devastating hurricane.
I took this photo 11/24/2012.

At first it was because I had to rebuild my life. Divorce can sound almost trivial to anyone whose not gone through it because it's so commonplace that the commonality has almost diluted it. But our lives are structures that we build, like homes. Rebuilding one after what's there has been razed to the ground is not unlike constructing a place to live. It's just abstract.

It's easier to see when a house ravaged by a storm consumes the dweller with the occupation of rebuilding. But a life, not so much. The rebuilding isn't as obvious. Much of it is internal.

Our whole lives, we are constantly faced with building structures and rebuilding them.

But then I realized, it's not just rebuilding when something fell apart. We are rebuilding all the time, because we are building all the time.

We build relationships with friends, colleagues, family, neighbors, partners. We build careers, skills, jobs, habits, and routines. Sometimes they fall apart and we need to start over, and sometimes we just need to patch up some drywall.

The things we build, we must tend to. Nothing is ever built once and then okay to leave alone. We must maintain our homes or they'll fall apart. Same with our bodies. And our relationships. This isn't a new attention economy. It's always been an attention economy. Whatever we turn our attention to is what grows. We are never done assembling structures, repairing them, rearranging them. We all spend our lives building and rebuilding. That's part of what it means to be human. Lives are fluid.

Welcome to my blog, Rebuilding.