How To Build Your Life With A Daily Commitment

Living is brick by brick. Each step we take is a brick that we put in that building that we call our own life. We build unceasingly, without realizing it, every time we decide something, every time we take a step, even when we dream. We are houses under construction.

On some occasions we use materials that we have chosen (a profession, a partner, an ideology …) and on others we have to settle for the materials that the world has put in our hands without consulting us (a country, a language, a family , some physical characteristics …).

The important thing, however, is that you can trust that your own and other people’s materials protect you from the outside world: as in the story of The Three Little Pigs, the wolf can effortlessly knock down the straw hut and the wooden hut, but no longer the stone one, which resists his snorts, his shoves, his scratches, his rage.

The wolf knows, as seen in Little Red Riding Hood and The Seven Goats , to use ingenuity in addition to brute force to get us to open our doors for him: he disguises himself, sprinkles his leg with flour, modifies the timbre of his voice, he argues reasonable way. If he cannot tear down our house, he does his best to penetrate it and make it part of the thicket, a forest, a wilderness.

The lost plane

The wolves of the world – which, let’s not forget, most of the time are projections of our fears and our mistakes rather than real enemies of the outside world – have the sad mission of destroying what we have built: a house (which they try to turn into a pile of rubble), some values ​​(that discredit with their omnivorous immorality), a phrase (that they blur and distort so that it becomes unintelligible) or some feelings (that undermine from their foundations so that they stop sustaining our existence) .

To build is to protect yourself from the stalking of the internal and external wolves. To build is to learn to raise an insurmountable barrier between us, who yearn to be who we are, and those wolves, whose ferocity seeks to annihilate us. To build is to keep our heart safe from the bites of the many predators that want to feed on it.

It is necessary to know that the house should be at the service of one and not one at the service of the house.

But it should not be forgotten that we are houses that are built obeying a plan that has been lost (the same plan that the different religions, philosophies or literatures try to reconstruct).

Houses, therefore, which, as happens to us, hesitate, wobble, correct themselves as they go along, sometimes fall down and force us to start over from the beginning or spend more time outdoors (one occasion, for true, to enjoy the open sky and the wonders of nature, not just to feel unprotected). Unreliable houses if it were not for the fact that the verb to build, so tenacious and so alive, does not allow them to fall into despondency or take a moment of respite.

Building a life is, in this sense, making it possible, inscribing it within a plan (within a plane), putting it in contact with its landscapes and its limits. To build a life is to lift it with those bricks that were half piled up in the first paragraph (and with the beams, tiles, pipes, cables …), it is to design its rooms, it is to open doors and windows, it is to place it a roof that is resistant to rain and sun, is to furnish it.

Bricks, rooms, doors and windows, furniture, foundations: everything that makes our life project solid , what gives it stability, what fits it into society (a house neighboring many other houses), what makes it credible .

A daily commitment

But to build it is necessary to know that the house must be at the service of one and not one at the service of the house. He who does not achieve this remains a prisoner of his house, he becomes his own jailer. To build, therefore, in freedom and to be free : so that the house fulfills its function of sheltering us without incurring debts for doing so.

Build, then, like the one who entertains himself by making houses of cards. Or castles in the air. Building from fragility and from the ephemeral, from impermanence and change. Building assuming in advance the tremor caused by the possibility of a draft, a bad gesture, not having learned the science of the millimeters that is required to place the cards so that the castle does not collapse.

Anything, indeed, can spoil weeks or years of effort: in a second the castle collapses and forces us to start over. But that’s what building is: constantly starting over, redefining the house that contains us day by day, relentlessly reviewing the plasters, hinges, walls, frames, the state of the floors. Build, build ourselves: we are the masons and architects of our life.