On building spaceships and surviving floods

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

You feel the flood coming. You can’t prove it yet. The sky is clear, the ground is dry, and everyone around you is going about their day. But you know. And once you know, there’s only one thing to do: build the ship.

No one believes you. They never do. To them you’re the strange one, hammering away at something that doesn’t make sense for weather that isn’t here. That’s fine. You don’t build for them. You learn to listen only to the other believers, the few who feel the same thing in their bones, who showed up not to argue but to survive.

Every piece of the ship has to be perfect.

That’s the part people get wrong. They think you can cut a corner here, soften a plank there, file down the parts that make others uncomfortable, bend the ship to fit someone’s ideology, someone’s goals, someone’s idea of how things are supposed to look. You can’t. You know that piece matters. You know it’s load- bearing when the water comes. Every piece is. Each one belongs to the people who believed, the people who’ll be standing on this deck when the rest of the world is under water. You don’t owe that piece to anyone who wasn’t going to get on board anyway.

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. The goal was never to already know how. The goal is to try to build it. Because if I don’t, no one will. No one can. No one cares.

So I pick up the hammer.

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