"More art, less arson. It's perfect!" I thought to myself. "So punchy, a little edgy, and it points out the basic difference between good people – those who make things – and bad people – those who only want to burn it all down. I'm going to make that the title of my next blog post."

You'll notice that's not the title of this post. That's because as I worked through the idea behind the soundbite, I realized I don't believe it's true.

That title set up a binary where art was the antithesis to destruction, where those who create were the antithesis of those who destroy. And while that sounds good on social media, the world is not so simple.

Black or white. Yes or no. Day or night. Win or lose. Binaries surround us, those circumstances where the only options seem to be two opposites. Yet the world contains a rainbow of colors, and even a monochromatic palette contains shade after shade of gray. With maturity comes the awareness that "yes" and "no" are not blanket statements, for they always hold layers of nuance, exceptions, and caveats. The rhythms of the sun give us dawns and dusks and twilights. And wins often come at terrible cost, just as losses often come with important victories.

But it's much easier for us to hold to binaries in our lives than to wrestle with all the in-betweens, the layers, the nuances. In a binary world, we have either friends or enemies, and it's straightforward to know who is in which camp. We don't have to confront the subtle ways in which our friends differ from us, or the overt ways in which our enemies are the same as us. When we cling to binaries, we don't have to grasp a self-awareness that confronts the conflict between our self-perceptions and our internal realities.

Unchallenged dualities keep us comfortable; challenging those dualities leads us to maturity, to a deeper sense of humanity. So no, I don't believe we need more art and less arson, because the truth is that the world is not comprised of artists or arsonists.

We are not either creators or destroyers.

We are all both creators and destroyers.

In fact, these are not separate categories at all, but two perspectives of the same activity. Every work of creation requires some level of destruction, and every act of destruction initiates some kind of creation. To create music, silence must be destroyed; to destroy an abandoned building is to create an opportunity for new development. The two are conjoined.

But this is not to say that we are all the same. Some of us seek creation, while others seek destruction.

I believe all of us, deep inside, desire to create things that bring life. The pains and challenges we experience, though, often push us in the other direction, into a self-shielding cocoon that prioritizes the accumulation of personal power and well-being at the expense of the other people around us.

Over the course of our lives, if we do not actively cultivate priorities that create life, we tend to fall into priorities that destroy it, creating systems of war, discrimination, injustice, and other types of dehumanization that harm the lives of others.

If we want to create peace in the world, we must work to destroy the fear-filled systems of violence that lead to war. If we want to create justice, we must work to destroy the hate-filled systems that perpetuate discrimination.

We are all creators & destroyers. But what is it we are creating?