November 10, 2025- Small sustainable changes

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

~Friedrich Nietzsche

We can’t rebuild without at least a little bit of demolition. And when that demolition occurs, it will, inevitably, get a little messy.

We always have the option of continuing to do exactly what we’ve been doing. That may become increasingly difficult, as circumstances around us change, but we can hold onto old beliefs, old behaviors, and old habits. Our lives will be quite consistent, fairly easy to execute, and neat, in some sense. Is that what we want?

Don’t we want to evolve? Don’t we want to transform? Don’t we want to grow? The changes we would like to create in our lives will require us to dismantle some of our current structure. Is that such a bad thing? Are our lives so perfect now that we must hold dearly to every facet of them? If they were, would we be spending the time to write or read this essay?

We do not have to shatter everything. We get to choose. We can keep everything that serves us and tear the rest down. But just as a home can become uninhabitable for a time during aggressive remodeling, we can try to do too much, too fast. Small, sustainable changes will allow us to live with ourselves during the construction.