The Places We Stop Building

When I was seven, my grandfather took me to the edge of the construction site behind our house. He pointed to a stack of rusted iron beams that had been left in the mud for years. He told me that people often start things with a great deal of noise, but they only finish the things they truly love. I spent that entire summer climbing those abandoned beams, convinced they were the skeleton of a castle rather than a failed project. I didn’t mind that the path led to a dead end; the joy was in the climbing, not in arriving at a destination. As adults, we are taught to measure the value of a thing by its utility, by whether it gets us from one side of the river to the other. But what happens to the spaces that refuse to be useful? Do they simply wait for the world to grow quiet enough for them to become something else entirely?

Kirsten Bruening has captured this quiet transition in her image titled Bridges to Nowhere. It reminds me that even the things we leave behind can find a new purpose if we give them enough time. Does this stillness make you want to walk across, or simply sit and watch?