It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m quickly doing the dishes while my son is briefly enthralled by his play kitchen. It’s a typical day in Canberra, the sky is clear, the birds are singing to their mates, and a paper wasp is building a nest up in the eaves of my house.

This isn’t the first nest to be built there. Years ago, I saw a different family of wasps build their nest a few rafters over. That nest lasted a season, bore a few wasps and was swiftly abandoned.

I’m done washing now, and we head over to the couch. Hanging just outside the back window is a planter that is tipped on its side. Devoid of plant life, it has become the home of many a generation of Spotted Pardalote. Each generation tirelessly excavating a burrow to call home for the season. Adorning the insides with fine grass and feathers to make a home. Eggs are laid, fledglings emerge, and so the nest is abandoned. Until next year, when another spot is excavated and turned in to a safe space to protect new life.

The cycle of build, inhabit, departure, decay continues.

We humans build houses, mega structures, cities to achieve similar goals. Provide shelter and safety — a place for life to take place, but also to manufacture for profit and advance humanity.

We’ve built entire cities whose soul purpose was to provide shelter or manufacture cars — and when those things are no longer needed or financially feasible, we depart and let entropy take over.

We build homes in the suburbs and raise families, sometimes for several generations, but ultimately, those homes are abandoned and passed on to other people. In this case though, the structure itself is still used and cared for.

When a structure ultimately serves its purpose, however, we, much like the animal kingdom defaults to departure rather than demolition. I have no answer as to why, but departure feels more like a release. It feels more respectful to the places that sheltered us and helped us live our lives. It feels like we’re leaving behind a reminder, to ourselves and future generations or archeologists, that life happened here. That we briefly defied entropy, ordered something chaotic and did something beautiful with the result. And to let order naturally return to chaos is to let something in the universe slowly exhale. Unlike the abrupt and violent severance of demolition.

The same can be said for life itself. When our time comes, and our bodies are abandoned, we usually see the same processes take place. A natural decay, a return to the earth to feed other life and continue the cycle of impermanence. Even the seeming annihilation of cremation is just accelerated decay.

I watch my son at his pile of blocks now, placing wooden shapes down around his other toys. He’s building something too, in his way — temporary worlds, brief architectures of imagination that will be abandoned the moment something else catches his eye. No ceremony, no destruction, just departure.

Perhaps this is what we’re all doing. The wasp in the eaves, the pardalotes returning to burrow anew each season, the families who locked their doors one last time — we build, we inhabit, we leave. And in leaving rather than destroying, we acknowledge something true: that the structure was never really ours to unmake. We borrowed materials, borrowed time, created temporary pockets of order. But the materials themselves want to return, and maybe our departure is simply honouring and enabling that want.

The old pardalote nest from last season is still visible in the planter if you look closely — a small cave of earth and dried grass, already beginning to collapse in to the soil around it. The wasp nest from years ago has gone papery and gray, dissolving slowly into the eaves. These aren’t monuments to failure or loss. They’re evidence. Life happened here. Order briefly prevailed. And now the universe gets to slowly breathe it all back in.

I wonder if this is the real legacy we leave behind — not the structures themselves, but the pattern. The knowledge that it’s okay to build something beautiful, live fully and completely within it, and then simply walk away.