On the Road

This picture is strange. You probably look at people all the time, but unless you're Superman, this isn't what you see. You see hands and feet, clothes and a head. You see skin, you see hair. You don't see bones, or tendons, or internal organs. You don't really know much about the interior structure of a person, the way all their parts link up and do what they do. What happens in the shoulder of a professional baseball pitcher throwing a curveball? What happens in the knees of a college football player landing from a huge leap to catch a high ball? You can see the effects of what happens; the pitcher throws a strike, the receiver scores a touchdown. But you have no clue what happened behind the scenes to allow that to occur.

Like people, the only time after a building's construction that you get to see its internal workings is when something goes wrong. Don't look up "Kevin Ware Injury" unless you're sure you can handle it. Similarly, you don't see what's inside the structure of a building until somebody punches a hole in the wall. And even then, your view is very limited.

Unless, of course, you step into a building while it is still being built. It's an entirely eerie process. You can see where things will go, the beginnings of the aesthetics of the building. Here, there'll be this grand, flowing wall. There, there'll be a kitchen, and there'll be students learning to cook again now that they lost parts of themselves in the war. Up here, we'll have rooms where residents will be able to get everywhere, even the bathroom, without worrying about how their body will be able to get them there.

But none of it is there yet. You can only see the stubs of what will be, the edifices in the structure devoted to this or that. In places, there are pipes and mechanical systems that you would never get to see otherwise. There are no doors or windows internally, only holes in the walls connecting space to space. You're partway in between the conception of the idea and its actual realization, and it shows.

There's something marvelous about the process of seeing idea from start to finish. How can one start from nothing to find an idea? How can you turn the idea to a plan for construction? How can you get the idea to actually happen through all the mishaps and impossibilities that arise as construction takes place? To create, you have to be able to adapt.