Saying "Yes" is such an important part of the journey, but taking yourself seriously trails a close second…
We thought we were serious when we set off on our first pass, but I’m not sure we had yet known what level of seriousness we needed, and so naturally, we were tested. We didn't build it twice per-say; but I will say, some of it was definitely built more than once.
Resources, we didn’t have much of, but what we did have was a legacy carpenter, a logician, an optimist and a quote that was entirely too high to have it done for us; and so we gathered the wood scraps we had laying around, a level, and some old nails and we set off into new territory.
With janky wood, the heat of a Caribbean summer on our faces, and eyes that knew better than the Level, that just couldn’t possibly be working correctly, we managed to disassembled, in seconds, what took a week of poor craftsmanship to build. Stress, the sun, and optical illusions: a seemingly relentless joke the mountain-incline and the Level seemed to share at our expense, led to a disagreement that would lead 2 out of the 3 of us to kick apart that which would have fallen all on its own accord if an additional few moments had only been granted.
Now, With our first attempt swiftly stomped out of existence, and tempers once again cooled to the point of functionality, we now had 2 options: give up, or level up. We had said "yes", we wanted to realize the dream we had set into motion but we would now have to commit to what accomplishing, that dream, would actually look like, and it would take a little more than our first attempt.
I can see why we initially thought old-wood would suffice; after all, we live by a code of letting nothing go to waste, and everything given a second life, AND this wood frame was only to exist long enough for us to put the rebar in place and pour the concrete that would become our stairway. So naturally, the wood from a freshly demolished shed seemed prime, but prime it was not, and so we got serious, stopped blaming the mountain (kind of), bought the wood & nails we really needed, and agreed: 1) the mountain is a trickster, can’t trust her to be forthcoming when it comes to what’s level; 2) Our eyes don’t know shit, also can’t trust them when it comes to level, AND...
3) ALWAYS TRUST THE LEVEL!
And with our new supplies and new found mantra, we started over, and we took it one step at a time, quite literally: measuring the rise, calculating the run, removing bits of mountain when we had to, trusting the level like we promised, ignoring the mountains suggested alterations, like our lives depended on it...until we made it to the top.
I, for all my value in this process, would by no means be considered the "MUSCLE" in this operation (strong... YES, but a mountain breaker, not so much), and so I must admit that in the universal test of our seriousness, I witnessed our team/ family, move literal mountains step by step for our dream. Every time we met a bit of mountain that seemed as though it would block any further progress, my brothers chipped away until the path was clear and I couldn’t have been more: proud, taken aback, and reaffirmed that we might actually do this… BUT first...we focus on framing the next 100 steps, and then perhaps we can move on to whatever
“Step 2” might be…
