Everything begins with a brief wandering of the eye. More specifically, you are sitting on your beautiful balcony on the fourth floor of a multi-story apartment, enjoying your coffee—or your wine—laughing about something, or perhaps crying about something else. Suddenly, in the moment of moments—the one most often overlooked—you pause and stare at the small wall that effortlessly separates you from certain death.
You stand up, seized by a surge of curiosity, and attempt to examine this humble wall. You tap it lightly and, by the sound, discover that it is completely hollow. You tap it again, this time with unease. Yes! this structure that has supported you and everyone you dragged in your place for more than a year has been hollow all along, and yet it has carried you, and everyone you’ve brought into that space and poor thing never complaint.
After this quiet but profound realization, you begin to explore other parts of your home that you had long ignored. Slowly, your apartment transforms into a kind of experiment.
“I am Marco Polo! Do you see that? Do you see how our sink has water? Did you know a civil engineer made that possible? There are underground pipes bringing clean water from reservoirs or desalination plants into our building and someone designed all of it!”
“But I thought an architect did that? NO! Isn’t that insane?”
“I am Christopher Columbus! Look at the hole in my wall that I call a door! A civil engineer ensured that loads transfer safely around it so that my flower wallpaper would not crack!”
And this is when you begin to understand that everything mundane and unremarkable around you is supported by an intricate system. This is when you start to realize, once again, that perhaps there are two universal forces two things that can always connect you and me effortlessly, separating us from certain death.
The floor we walk on, designed by someone who once loved doodles and mathematics, and the grand narratives humanity creates and embeds within society everything quietly holding us up, everything unseen, everything done for the love of the craft.
So, next time you are on your balcony, or veranda, or laying on your bathroom floor, pause, go past the spectacle of excess that you have been taught to adore, and think of how the modernist poet: William Carlos Williams, wrote This is Just to Say to confess to his lover that he has eaten the plums they have been saving in the fridge, and how his kitchen probably had a slight slope toward a drain, because a civil engineer wanted to be extra conservative on that day.
Also read: The myth of beginning
