BUILDING

The magic of BUILDING is the magic of CREATING: the magic of crafting a thing that didn’t exist before, but now does. It’s an act of putting a piece of yourself out into the world, into both the harshness of reality, and the beauty of the presence of others. When you create something, you come to terms with the base reality, with the harsh and beautiful truth of our existence. In a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, creation is the ultimate challenge, and the most human of pursuits: whether through laying pigment on canvas via brushstroke, chiseling at marble to reveal a sculpture, blending together ingredients for a delicious dish, crafting a chair or sofa or bed frame or dresser that will be passed on through generations, machining a mechanical linkage, fabricating circuits on semiconductor, or writing software that will run on a computer on the other side of the world. Creation is part of our human calling to shape the world to our own ideals — ideals so perfect that reality may never be capable of fully expressing them — and yet we try anyway. Creation is the act of moving ideas from a single human’s imagination to the collective imagination of our species. We create when we write, when we lecture to a rapt audience, when we are moved to music, to poetry, to song, to dance. We create when we communicate the waves in our own mind to the waves in the minds of others, through the medium of reality.