Building a Home, Rebuilding a Self

I come from a family of people who could build things with their hands. But it took me forty years to realize that the tools used to frame a house are the exact same tools needed to rebuild a broken life.

My father put himself through night-school to become a mechanical engineer. His father was incredibly practical and skilled. My uncle was a master builder who turned to the trade after he stopped fishing commercially. I worked for him every summer from age thirteen to eighteen. Aside from the technical skills, he taught me something more important: There was always a solution; you just had to figure it out.

Those summers were my first education in phronesis - practical wisdom. Not the kind you read in books. The kind you learn with your hands.

The Dream on Eleuthera

In 2001 I bought a piece of land on Eleuthera in The Bahamas. An acre, with 150 feet of beach. I took a camera on a stick and figured out that from a second floor I would have a 360-degree view: Harbour Island; the bayside; the Atlantic Ocean; Glass Window Bridge. It was perfect.

I had just been through a divorce. I took my half of the flat we sold in London and bought that land and a dive shop. It was my new start. I built the business. I lived in the tropics. I was building something with my hands.

Then I met my second wife. She was vacationing on Harbour Island. She had been coming to the island for years. Her dream, she told me, was to live there and raise a family. I had met women over the years, but most were only there for a holiday romance. None of them wanted to stay. None of them wanted a family. She was different. She wanted what I wanted. We had a daughter.

And then my wife changed her mind. She wanted to go home to Montana.

The Burial of a Self

Leaving The Bahamas felt like killing a part of myself. The dive shop wasn’t just a business, it was the life I had chosen when I walked away from academia. The land on Eleuthera was the future I had been building with my own hands. Selling wasn’t a transaction so much as a burial. I didn’t just lose a place, I lost the person I was becoming there.

The resentment I carried from that decision was heavy. She had promised me a life I had been searching for, and then she took it away. But I was the one who ultimately made the choice to leave.

Letting go of that resentment wasn’t about forgiving her. It was about seeing clearly that my life was mine to shape, even when it didn’t go the way I had planned. That is what practical wisdom asks of us: not control over what happens, but agency over how we respond.

Building through the Burnout

We moved to Bozeman, her hometown. She had always wanted a house in downtown Bozeman, but the best she’d been able to manage was a trailer. I bought her one with the proceeds from the sale of the land on Eleuthera. It was 80 years old and nearly condemned. It was a stupid project for me to take on. It required far more skill than I possessed at the time.

In some ways I think I took it on hoping I would fail. That it would be another unfinished path in my life. That is how depressed I was.

But I had a made a new friend in Bozeman. An accomplished builder who had also lost everything in the 2008 crash. He did what I could not: he showed me how. He taught me framing, electrical, plumbing, finish work. He let me go ahead and make mistakes, and then helped me tear things out and start again.

At first, my heart wasn’t in it. I was just going through the motions, trying to fill the days. But something strange happened. By continuously showing up and making something with your hands, you end up putting your heart in it. At least I did. I put care and effort into that house, and I was proud of how it turned out. But though I built it for her, my heart didn’t beat for her.

The land on Eleuthera was the dream I had to bury. The house in Bozeman was the grave I built with my own hands, and then slowly turned into a home. I didn’t build it alone. My friend refused to let me fail, even when I was hoping I would.

Protecting my Peace in Idaho

Then I bought a log cabin in Idaho, two hours from Bozeman and right by Yellowstone National Park. It was a wreck; it became my escape. I could go there on weekends rather than spend them with my wife.

The times I went alone were an experiment in Epicurean ataraxia - seeking a quiet sanctuary to shield my mind from a life that felt like a prison. I needed a place where I could breathe, where I could be myself, even though I didn’t know who that was anymore.

But often, I took my young daughter with me. Together, the cabin became about something deeper. We'd stop at the Mc Donalds in West Yellowstone to get a treat, and then spend the day cleaning, pulling nails, sanding logs and varnishing floors.

Through the work, my heart followed my hands more easily. The physical labor was the same as Bozeman, but the person I was building for was different. She was my daughter. What I was building wasn’t just a cabin; it was a memory I hoped she would carry. I was trying to show her that you could take something broken and make it whole with your hands. I wanted to give her the ultimate tool: the knowledge that there is always a solution, you just have to figure it out. And sometimes you need someone to help you.

What Eudaimonia Actually Looks Like

When the second divorce went through, I sold the cabin to my friend: the same man who had helped me rebuild in Bozeman. He had lost everything once too. Now he holds the place my daughter and I built together, so I can still visit. I can still sit in the place we made.

What I learned through all of this is that flourishing isn’t about getting what you want. It’s about what you do when you don’t get what you want.

The heart doesn’t always arrive before the hands. Sometimes it follows. My heart didn’t beat for my wife, but it beat for the work. It beat for the person I was rebuilding through the act of building. The heart still follows; we just fail to recognize that the person it follows is ourselves.

I didn’t do any of it alone, and that is what Aristotelian philia looks like. Not just casual, surface-level affection, but a practical presence. It’s the chosen family that refuses to let you fail, even when you are hoping you will.

Eudaimonia, I have come to think, isn’t a mood or a mindset. It isn’t about having your heart in the right place before you start. It’s about showing up anyway, and letting the hands teach the heart what it needs to learn. We don’t flourish alone. But we also don’t flourish by pretending to be someone we’re not. We flourish by becoming who we are, one act of building at a time.

Author’s Note: I still think about that piece of land on Eleuthera sometimes, and the 360 degree view I never got to build. But I have walked that land since then, with the woman I love. We ran our Bahamian Potcake on the beach I once dreamed of building on. I don’t regret selling it anymore. My life with her is complete and I no longer feel the need to recreate a path I have already walked.

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