The building doesn’t matter.

It’s easy to forget. You can get tied up in the creation, in the assembly, the structuring, and alignments. The worst of us are distracted by the process of it; the selections, the connections, the tools, the creation of instructions. It’s an easy distraction.

You make. You craft. You spin forms out of thoughts. You layer meaning. You look past what you’ve done before. You try again. You schedule.

But, the building?… It doesn’t matter.

There’s a door. There’s a room inside. There’s a floor, and a table, and chairs, and a bed, and a bright red painted wall, and it’s flooded with daylight.

But, if it’s empty?… It doesn’t matter.

But, it’s not empty. We live in there; with our mess, and our trials, and our joys, and our failures, and our continual passion for more and less, and our peanut-butter covered kids. And, we laugh. We live. And we die. And, some of us mourn with every breath and carry more than we can. Then we take another breath and remember the first of the firsts we’ve had and the promise of the next we may. We realize we’re not alone, so we push on and it gets better, then worse, then better, then we break something and we replace it. And we smile.  And, we prop each other up like fence posts.

But, the building?… It doesn’t matter.

Ah, but there are people in there…

and they’re messy.

All photos are from Ryan Thomas’ photostream on Flickr – and have been used under the creative commons license. You can see more of his amazing abandoned building photos HERE.