On building spaceships and surviving floods

There’s a kind of knowing that arrives before the evidence does.

You feel the flood coming. The sky is clear, the ground is dry, and everyone around you is going about their day. You cannot yet persuade them that anything needs to change. But the feeling does not leave you alone.

So you begin building the ship.

To someone watching, the work makes no sense. It belongs to weather that is not here. You can spend the whole day explaining why you have begun and end it with nothing built. At some point you need people beside you who believe enough to start working, even when there is very little to show them.

Then the belief has to become something that holds.

That is the part I keep coming back to. It is easy to defend an idea while it is still an idea. Once you begin making it, every piece asks something of you. Can you build it? Does it belong there? If it will not hold, it has to change.

But making it hold is not the same as making it easier to approve. I don’t want to file away the reason for building until the result resembles something everyone already understands. The people who trust the work will have to live with what I actually made, not what I meant to make.

I’m no Noah. I won’t pretend to be. But I believe, really believe, that we’ll soon need to build the spaceship.

Maybe I don’t know how. Maybe I’ll get pieces wrong and have to tear them out and start again. Beginning does not require me to have already solved that. It requires me to try, and to keep working when the difficulty stops being imaginary.

If I wait for someone else to begin, I may spend my whole life waiting.

So I pick up the hammer.