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Every now and then you have a quiet little experience that forces you to look at deeper truths. That happened to me this weekend when I took my wife and little daughters hiking in the Big Sur Wilderness.

My little girls are 5 and 8 and full of energy. It was a blast for them to skip up the trail and they loved hopping on rocks and balancing on tree branches as we crisscrossed back and forth several times over a small creek running towards the ocean.

Midway up the trail we came around a bend and saw a wondrous stack of 20 plus stones in the middle of the creek. My daughters were enthralled by the site. “What is that, Daddy?” I explained that someone had carefully created a work of natural art that would have taken a long time to arrange. “Cool! I like it”

We continued up the trail for another 30 minutes and rested before the return journey down the canyon. Several other people passed by and smiled at us, obviously enjoying their day in the Wilderness. A few looked weary, like a teenager that acted as if he was hiking against his will with his Dad.

We finally turned back and made our way down the canyon. A couple of times my daughter commented “I think the art is around the next corner”, only to be disappointed. Coming over a rise, my daughter’s voice rose in excitement. “I know this is the spot Daddy, I’m going to go look at it again”. She raced forward, only to stop with a confused look on her face. “I don’t see it”.

Sure enough, the stone tower was nowhere to be found. There was clear evidence why the tower was gone by looking at footprints in the wet sand leading up to the place where the stones had stood. The teenager had taken pleasure in kicking the tower down.

What had taken a long time to create had been destroyed in less than a second. For one person’s amusement, many people were deprived of it’s magic. Hoping my daughter didn’t see the clues I saw, I told her the tower must have fallen over by itself.

As we continued down, my mind drifted into thoughts on what had just happened and how it had affected me. The conclusion was simple. I realized I could be a creator or a destroyer. I could enrich other people’s lives or poison them for my own amusement.

I constantly had a choice to make. What path would I walk? How would I teach my daughters to chose the wisest path? Have you ever consciously made the choice to walk up to someone Else’s artwork and kick it down because you weren’t happy yourself?