What a Month of Repair and Festival Prep Actually Taught Me

I started this month writing about damp patches and swollen wood.

I’m ending it writing about letting go of a mandap after ten days of building it.

I didn’t plan the arc. It found itself, the way most honest writing does.

But looking back at the month as a whole, I think it taught me the same thing twice, from two completely different directions.

The repair pieces were all some version of the same idea. Small problems, caught early and actually looked at, stay small. Ignored, they get expensive.

The festive pieces ended up teaching something almost the opposite, and just as true. Some things aren’t meant to be preserved at all. They’re meant to be fully built, fully lived in, and then let go.

I don’t think those two ideas actually contradict each other. I think they’re both about the same thing: paying real attention to something while it’s still small enough, or still here, to actually matter.

A damp patch, looked at honestly in September, before it becomes a real problem!!

A mandap, built fully for ten days, then released without holding on.

Neither one is really about the wall or the mandap!!

They’re both about actually noticing something while you still can, instead of after.

That’s the month. Not planned that way, but I’ll take it. Journalising Designers Esha Bhandari