Foundations; Ideas Matter, to Me at Least

Spontaneous Creative Writing

Imagine you’re conducting an inspection of your home with a professional. Everything measures up and looks great, until you get to the basement.

You’re crawling around in a tight space you’ve never explored before. The inspector asks you an incredibly strange question:

“Where is your foundation?”

You don’t know how to answer. You just assumed your house had a foundation. How can a house even stand without one? This doesn’t make sense. You never checked. You’re not a contractor. You wouldn’t know what to look for.

But it’s too late for that now. Suddenly, you can sense the weight of the house above you. A house that is slowly starting to shift and fall. You go from nervous, to scared, to terrified. You feel trapped. Quickly, you back track and get out of there.

You’re a little dusty and shaken up a bit, but you’re ok. You look back at your house and it looks just like everyone else’s on your block. They’re tall and pressed up against each other. Each one held up by the other.

They must be fine. So, you decide to just stay out of the basement. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?

But I can’t stay out. That’s where I long to be. And I want everyone else to see what’s down there and why it matters. It’s in part my disposition and I know it’s not for everyone. My highest score on a personality test told me I would be “obsessed by engaging with ideas and abstract concepts.” Which makes sense. That’s what’s in the basement. Fundamental ideas that seem incredibly abstract without a connection to modern examples.

When people try to tell me that gender is an arbitrary social construct not tied to any underlying truth, I don’t see them simply trying to be nice to people who are outside of the norm. I see someone in the basement chopping down the foundations of our psychological evolution. I see modernity crumbling. But try explaining that and why it matters without spending hours on the history of art and mythology. When your morality is tied to an ideology rooted in what you think are arbitrary social constructions, you won’t want to hear it anyways.

So things start to fall apart.

Maybe that’ll shock people into interest. A part of me wants things to fall apart so I can say, “See! I told you to pay attention.” But that’ll be more prideful than helpful and very painful. Maybe this time they’ll pay attention to the foundations. At least for a few minutes. Until everything works again. When was the last time you popped the hood of your car and tried to figure out how things work? As long as it goes, who cares, right?

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be and always will be like that. As things fall apart, that might be the opening to expose and shore up those foundations.

A time and a place for everything and everyone.