What disappears isn't just people and buildings, it's memory, belonging, culture. I'm not here with a simple fix. What I'm saying is we must rebuild, but we need to rebuild with identity in mind.
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Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that "he" had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.
Viktor Frankl
The mark of the historic is that the present moment always will have been. What we do now is irrevocable—it joins the permanent record of what has occurred, and in that sense the past is the only thing that cannot be taken from us.
José Ortega y Gasset — History as a System
Obstacles are the universe's hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control. The moment an obstacle bisects the trajectory of intent, it creates a natural midpoint that is both an end and a beginning, but also something else entirely, for it lives on a different plane from the strict linearity of the will as cause and its intended effect.
Bayo Akomolafe