Share on bsky
View this post on Instagram
There was a gate at the end of a paved road where my then husband and I bought our first home.
It was easy enough to walk around the gate, bike around, take a four-wheeler around. I even saw people drive around it. The road continued. Completely paved.
This road went on for miles winding through mountains of sand dunes that were piled high on either side. The story was there was a developer who started a project and just simply never finished. The pipeline for water and sewer already laid, the underground electrical already running…it was simply waiting for houses.
I could see the finished development in my mind every time I walked my big brown lab mix dog through the unfinished neighborhood. I pictured large sprawling homes overlooking the lake. Some with big front porches and swinging chairs where you could sit out at night listening to the peepers chirp.
At 22 years old, I couldn’t imagine why someone would invest so much time, money, and vision into a dream only to never complete it. It seemed crazy to me.
About 20 years later, I found myself thinking of the development again. I had moved far away by then; the country life was not natural for me. I wondered why I kept thinking about this place I hadn’t been in two decades. I’m a believer that when you find yourself thinking about something like this, it’s telling you something about where you’re at.
I had found myself battling a lot of fear during this current chapter in my life. While I was happy I was aware enough to notice it and not let it rule my actions, I was also frustrated that it existed in me.
One night lying in bed after praying, asking God for guidance, my mind drifted to the development. A clear thought ran through my mind, “Erika, if you stopped what you’re in the middle of now, would it be based on the reality in front of you and showing you, or based on your own fear of failure?”
I knew in that moment that was why my mind revisited the long winding road through the sand dunes.
I found myself worrying about time. Time I had wasted in my 20s and early 30s. I could have moved through life with more purpose. Pushed myself harder toward my goals. It felt like time lost. And I was terrified of being in the same place 10 years from now. Sometimes an overwhelming fear would wash over me, convincing me there might not be enough time left to create the life I knew I was moving toward.
That was something that never changed about me as I got older. My desire for expansion. To keep learning. Keep growing. To build. To want to go back and do things a second time because I feel like I could do them better now with the knowledge I’ve acquired along the way.
I laughed as I realized why I had been thinking about the unfinished development so much. The contractor never broke ground on a single house or laid a single foundation. Suddenly, I knew that if I didn’t finish laying the foundation, the framing couldn’t go up. And without the framing, there wouldn’t be a roof, siding, windows, or rooms.
Fortunately, I have people in my life who remind me to focus on the day in front of me; the house isn’t built all at once. It’s one nail into one two-by-four, then one wall at a time, one room at a time, until you look back and realize the whole house has been built. And it helps me breathe a little and relax.
What my 22-year-old self didn’t know back then was that sometimes it’s easier when you’re younger to ignore the fear that’s inside you. Maybe you haven’t had as many negative experiences, or you simply have more energy because you haven’t had to pick yourself up again after a setback.
Or maybe the contractor had experiences like many of us have had where we wanted to keep building and were surprised when we looked up that the person or people we thought were working diligently beside us decided to call it a day.
Being young and full of hope isn’t naivety. It’s vision. Possibility. All you see is that you have years ahead of you. So much time to accomplish what you dream of.
As we get older, fear gets better at making predictions. It starts sounding less like imagination and more like wisdom. It quietly convinces us that because something could happen, it probably will. That because we’ve experienced disappointment before, we already know how this story ends.
That’s how foundations get abandoned. Not because the work in front of us suddenly becomes impossible, but because fear gets us looking so far down the road that we stop laying today’s brick. We become consumed with whether the house will ever be finished instead of focusing on the board, the nail, or the wall that’s right in front of us. Instead of responding to the experience in front of us, we sometimes let fear weave a story in the background.
I understood why I had started thinking about that road.
Not because of the houses that were never built.
But because the road was.
The foundation was there. The utilities were in the ground. Long before anyone ever saw a finished neighborhood, someone had already done miles of invisible work.
Fear only sees the empty lots, and says, “There’s no house.”
Reality says, “There’s already a foundation, infrastructure, and miles of work beneath the surface.”
Respond to the evidence of what you’ve already built, how far you’ve come since you first broke ground, and then keep building.
The most important thing is to just keep building.
~
Read 0 comments and reply