If you haven’t personally experienced the horrible feeling of walking into an abandoned building, then I’m sure you’ve seen examples on the TV and in movies.
Usually, you’d be in a dark alley somewhere, a horror film about the zombie apocalypse, or deep in the woods, where all men fear to tread.
None of those examples sounds nice! This must mean something.
Why do abandoned homes, buildings, or towns fit into eerie scenes so easily?
How it all began
You are probably curious as to how I even got onto the subject in the first place. So here goes…
I really don’t like spiders at all. I mean any kind of spider; poisonous, harmless; huge, small; hairy, smooth – I just hate and cringe at the thought of any kind of spider.
That’s point one; point two is this: I’m not the most disciplined guy in the world either. I don’t like cleaning or washing, or any kind of ‘unimportant’ work (normally).
But, If you put a spider or his web in my line of sight, I become a clean freak.
After one of these episodes – destroying all signs of spider-life in my universe – I kicked back, relaxed, and we started talking about how spiders always inhabit a place where little goes on (and boy, they don’t waste any time).
This, naturally, freaked me out and so I allowed (or begged for) the subject to change to how you can actually see the lifelessness of a building if no one lives there.
We are alive
A feeling similar to nostalgia took over that moment. The sunlight seemed brighter, the walls seemed whiter, my family seemed happier, and everything seemed to have life – because we lived there…
Our homes, our workplaces, our communities, our countries breathe because we live in them. It seems strange to us that an inanimate object could become alive, like in the cartoons we watched when we were children, but maybe they weren’t so far off…
I’m trying to put a fun spin on this, but I’m struggling (It’s really more compassionate than fun). This is my message: Thanksgiving has passed and Christmas is around the corner – if buildings visually die right before our eyes due to the absence of people, how much more would those we care about, if we abandoned them.
In this season, let’s expel abandonment and instead live self-sacrificially; may all our actions be motivated by love.