Gutting

Pin It Such a coarse word, isn’t it?

I drove to work yesterday morning. The windows of my car were down, and the fresh air cascaded around me like the rushing of cool mountain waters. I wriggled my fingers in the early crisp, feeling its welcoming bite in my lungs—every breath I took seemed to spell autumn. As I stopped my car at the next intersection, my wandering eyes noticed the vacant building on the corner; it’d been unoccupied for quite some time.

As I waited for the light to change, I gazed though the makeshift chain link barrier, fashioned to keep the snooping away from the dust shrouded, demolished rubble which now lay in heaps across the weed-riddled parking lot. The front of the building had been torn away; bare wiring reached feebly from the walls, like the twisted, reaching tendrils of wisteria vines seeking the healing rays of sunlight. Torn strips of jagged metal hung like ribbons from the ceiling; while brick—once cemented mightily together in walls of veritable strength—now lay humbly in sundry piles.

This once-powerful building had been gutted, destroyed, and emptied; only an echo remained where life had once existed.

The light seemed to take longer than usual as I stared, thinking of the moments in my life when I have felt an awful lot like that old building—an interlacing of wiry thought—broken and dangling; a crisscross of metallic supports torn asunder and away, a structure of framework and walls demolished.

In a word—gutted.

However, as I gazed wordlessly through the chink fence, I could also see beyond the destruction; I could perceive something else…something deeper than that which was obvious on the surface.

Hope. Revitalization. Potential.

Like that devastated building, there have been times in my own life when I have needed a major overhaul—a rebuilding of that which is me. I can’t ever recall a time when this rebuilding has not been painful one; often those things which have been exposed to the sunlight have not been pretty. However, what has been restored has always been something of much greater beauty and value than what which was there before.

What is a life without the hope of being able to rise from the ashes of yesterday, as something far greater than what we once were? What is existence without the fervent anticipation in knowing that things can—and will—get better than perhaps they are at the present moment?

There is nothing.

The light changes from crimson to emerald, and my vehicle again lurches forward, bringing with it the cool, whispered hints of winter. As I continue my journey to work, I consider all of those things in my own life which I must rebuild.