It occurred to me today that rebuilding is hard, but sometimes, it’s necessary.

I wiped my phone yesterday. Completely cleaned it off. Reset it. Returned it to factory settings. Everything erased.

I did it because I’d been receiving, for about a week, messages that I was running out of storage space on the phone. Granted, my phone is three years old and it didn’t have that much memory on it to start (64GB). The phone started acting up because there wasn’t enough free space left on the phone for it to be able to function properly.

I tried removing apps that I wasn’t using any more. That didn’t work. I tried deleting unnecessary files. That didn’t work. I tried moving stuff, from the internal storage to an SD card that I’ve always had in the phone (for my music files). That didn’t work.

So, it got to the point that I didn’t think anything, short of a complete refresh, was going to work. And, I got to tell you, bringing myself to the point where I worked my way through pressing that “RESET” button, and then confirming, and then confirming again –they really don’t want you doing this by accident– was kind of scary. I was afraid of what I was going to lose. I was afraid of forgetting that one thing, on the phone somewhere, that I was about to delete, without which I wouldn’t be able to function.

But, when it became clear that I wasn’t getting anywhere with any other approach, I did what needed to be done. So now, I’m in the process of bringing the phone back to the place where it works, where it does the things that I need it to do. It will take time, and I’m sure I will discover those things that I’ve lost forever (hopefully nothing too critical).

I can say though, it is functioning much better than it was.

* * *

I feel a little guilty admitting this, even though I’ve admitted it in other blog posts of mine. The pandemic and the quarantine have been pretty good for me. I have been able to reorganize my life because of what has happened over the last twelve weeks. I remember, immediately after the quarantine began, marveling at the fact that my family calendar, usually chocked full of things for me and my wife and my children to do, was emptied out.

With all of that ‘stuff’ removed, and with the opportunity to rebuild a life that was going to get me and my family through the quarantine, we got to make some different decisions. We got to approach things in a different way. As a teacher, I was challenged to deliver content to students and to assist them in their learning remotely. All of these things were hard, but I certainly feel like I am coming out the other side of this whole thing with a better focus and perspective than I had going into this historical event.

Although I would never want something like this to happen again, I can’t say that I’m sorry for it. The reset –removing all of the stuff that had been cluttering my life so that I could have a clean surface on which to put the pieces back together in a better way– is something for which I will always be thankful.

* * *

In the wake of national unrest with respect to police brutality, and abuses of power, and racism, people are looking for answers. People want to see reform happen because they are tired of hearing the same stories happening over and over again. Federal, state, and local laws are being passed that will (hopefully) make it less likely that a police officer will kill a civilian during any of their encounters with the public.

But, some people are looking for larger changes. The city council of Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, has taken steps to completely dismantle their police department, to try to get to the place where they can start from scratch, perhaps. Moves like this are certainly drastic, and the chances that a process like this will have an impact on how safe people are in their communities while the rebuilding happens, have to be weighed against other approaches that might not be as invasive.

Maybe those other approaches have been tried –I saw a member of the Minneapolis city council being interviewed and she said that they’ve tried other approaches before deciding to take these steps– or maybe change is so overdue that only the most drastic options are left.

As a nation, faced with systems that don’t work in situations where approaches have been tried and those approaches have failed, at what point are we obligated to attempt approaches of a more extreme nature?

Burning your house down because you don’t like the wallpaper is one thing, but at what point should the house be burnt down?

* * *

When we get to the point where we are forced into extreme change, it’s scary and it’s unfortunate, but it can also be positive and beneficial. The mythological phoenix is not reborn until it dies, the seed must be destroyed so that it can become the seedling, and the caterpillar gets reworked to become the butterfly.

Furthermore, it’s pitiful that we often don’t initiate change until we absolutely have to do so –> I probably should have been staying on top of the storage on my phone the whole time, and I probably should not have let my life get to the place where I needed a quarantine to set things straight, and a police department shouldn’t get so bad that it has to be dismantled in order to be made right.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, we have an opportunity whenever we are faced with rebuilding. To do things better than we did them before, to get right what we couldn’t get right previously, to advance the cause so that we end up in a better place; these are the opportunities that we have in any rebuilding.

Rather than hiding from change or griping about the work in front of us, may we seize every opportunity that comes in the rebuilding.