Cathedrals

Imagine telling a peasant you’re going to build a cathedral.

Someone who hasn’t got enough to see out the winter. And you tell them you’re going to build the biggest, fanciest thing they’ve ever seen, and a thousandth of it will actually be usable. The rest is height. Spires that hold nothing up.

They won’t see it finished. Nor will their children. You’re not funded past the first year. Nobody’s built one quite like it, so you don’t really know it’ll stand.

And here’s the part I keep turning over: they probably can’t even picture it. You say cathedral, and their head, scaled to getting through to spring, builds something a tenth of the size. Not because they’re slow. Because the frame you live in quietly sets the size of what you’re able to imagine.

So what lifts the cap? Maybe just the odd useless, out-of-frame question, asked by someone who should have been worrying about the winter.

Scouts

Most of the bees that leave the hive find nothing.

The scouts. The ones that don’t work the flowers everyone already knows, but fly off looking for a source nobody’s found. By the hive’s daily maths, they’re a waste of energy. Most come back with nothing.

But the hive with no scouts dies the day the known flowers fail. You can’t tell in advance which flight finds the next source. So you can’t stop flying, even though almost every flight is, on paper, pointless.

I don’t think this makes the scout special. The scout is mostly wrong. It just makes the scouting necessary, which isn’t the same thing.

Success

What does success even look like now?

My friend on five figures and my friend on considerably more end up with the same house, the same car, the same washing machine. So how does two zeros less buy the same life?

And what are we striving for, if everyone lands in roughly the same place anyway?

Do we need clear water, a visible gap, to make the striving mean anything?

And it’s the one whose head is above the parapet who gets taxed for it. Not the quiet money below him. Not the corporate money that never shows its face. Why do we tax the visible one, and leave the rest alone?

If we wanted the best people, in anything, would we have to reward it? Or do we get whoever will do it for the kudos, or the family name, instead?