Deconstructing is about breaking yourself apart so you can become more malleable and also receptive – able to accept and handle more and more. The more things you are able to accept and love, the more you are becoming love yourself. Then you love all manner of people and things; there is nothing you don’t love. Deconstructing is also about becoming open to how big the world is and all the people who are different from you. Not everyone is like you. Your goal is to love them ALL.

We tend to think as we grow up, we are just supposed to become more resolute about what we already believe. That is boring. If you just keep heading in that direction, you are just going to get crotchety and rigid. Younger people will think you are “set in your ways”, unwilling to change your mind, and unable to change and grow with them. You will make yourself irrelevant and not trustworthy to come alongside them in some of their most tender growth. You don’t know it, but you also make yourself unavailable for your own growth.

Deconstructing is about taking yourself apart, breaking up the soil and becoming fertile ground for a new crop – and then oscillating back to a period of dormancy/death again. It is the cyclical shedding and regeneration that is the pattern for all of life around us.

Deconstructing is about dying, becoming not a self. In order to do that, you have to enter fully. You can’t die your death half-ass, trying to hold onto some shred of what you were before and wanted to keep. You have to let yourself descend fully into darkness, unsure if you will wake back up or what you will be when you do.

Deconstructing is for those who are ready to tear themselves apart and not be sure if or how they will be rebuilt again. Some say deconstruct so you can reconstruct. What they don’t tell you is once you reconstruct, you are going to deconstruct again. It is an endless process, so don’t get too attached to what you are at any one point. The older you get, the less you should be holding onto the things you think define you. You should be less and less a self. The whole point is dying.