I Climb Stairs, You Invent The Space Shuttle, They Build A Pyramid

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It’s official. I’m a nearly sixty-year-old chick who’s climbed the stairwell of the Empire State Building, from bottom to top, in 21:48 — that’s minutes, not hours.

You think I’m crazy. You think what I did was impossible. Trust me. I was a third of the way back in the field from the frontrunners. Those lead runners are the crazies — but they’re not if you pick apart how they were able to run to the top in ten minutes.

One word — training.

My short visit to NYC had me thinking how incomprehensible so many things seem. How can we possibly do what we do? The day after the race, I toured the city with my son who tagged along to check off some of the PTO he never takes.

“Look at that thing!” I’d say to him as we walked around mid-town and craned our necks, gawking at the shiny buildings reflecting the sun in the most blinding way. How did they figure out how to get something so skinny and so tall to stand without falling over? The architecture and sculpture in NYC, the museums showcasing the wildest of inventions and remarkable discoveries, the thriving conglomeration of dense population, the scope of small businesses — it was enough to blow your mind.

Climbing 1586 steps in 21 minutes paled by comparison. (I know. I know. It was almost 22 minutes. Shush.)

My son and I peeked at the lobby of the Javits Convention Center on our way to the Intrepid Museum. Javits is quite an accomplishment. The ceiling is astounding. “Check that out,” I said, pointing to the structure from the sidewalk. “Let’s go inside just to see what it’s like.”

We walked in, and true to expectation, the experience blew our minds. The massive ceiling of the lobby is all-glass with an intricate geometric interplay of metal bars that create a complex web of lines that are pure beauty. Plenty of people have been in the Javits Center. For some, perhaps it’s become a routine vision, but my greatest hope is that for most everyone walking into the front doors of that building, the experience is one of utter appreciation for what people can do over time with repeated effort.

To all of you who created the Javits lobby: thank you.

After Javits, my son and I continued to the Intrepid, the aircraft carrier launched during WW2, which also served during the Cold War, Vietnam War, and as a NASA recovery vehicle. It’s now permanently docked on the western edge of Manhattan. There are all things Navy there — planes, helicopters, control rooms, but NASA, too, and you can see a British Airways Concorde parked on the tarmac below the deck of the enormous ship.

“How did we ever get to the point that we could transport airline passengers at supersonic speeds?” you’ll ask. You’ll read descriptions of how astronauts fit into a squishy Soyuz space capsule. You walk, baffled, under the long stretch of the Enterprise space shuttle. Naturally, you’ll talk to your son about the Webb Telescope too, because that’s humankind's latest great stunning accomplishment. It’s too much to comprehend. Your steps up a skyscraper the night before will seem a speck of an endeavor. But they’re not even close to a speck. They’re imaginable, whereas the Space Shuttle is not.

But what is it we’re trying to wrap our heads around here?

When my friends and family stare at me wide-eyed about my stair-running wackiness, what is it that has them caught in that baffled trance? My guess is that it seems too hard to imagine doing such a thing. “How many stairs is that?” they’ll ask. “You did how many floors?!”

When we shake our heads at the James Webb telescope or a skyscraper piercing the clouds, we look at the final moment of all the work that brought it to that stage. When we only try to fathom that final moment — the result of the effort — it becomes an instant mystery. And why wouldn’t it? That’s a lot to try to fit into one moment.

We all do this. As much as I struggle to convince you that you can climb to the top of the Empire State Building, you’ll have to struggle to explain to me that the one-year project you and your team completed at work is doable. This is because effort over time is an invisible thing. Never once did someone say to me three months ago as I came home a sweat-infested thing, “Wow! You just went to the gym to train for the Empire State Building race? That’s amazing!!”

I’ll be honest. Getting myself into my car and driving to the gym was amazing some days.

Once you throw in passion, interest, or some compelling motivator, effort over time can turn into historic results. If you multiply that by many people working on the same thing — oh boy. That’s how we got to where we are today — a technologically advanced species venturing into space, the brain, artificial intelligence, and disease in ways that shock the imagination.

It’s always been like this. I’ve been to the Great Pyramid of Giza. That goliath took 26 years to build with a peak workforce of 40K workers ferrying over 2 million blocks to a spot in the structure with nothing but arms, legs, and simple mechanics still to be determined. That’s nuts.

But it was the day-to-day that built that pyramid. Every day thousands of quarrymen woke, hopefully ate breakfast, and worked tirelessly to cut limestone from the ground. This is where the mindboggling sits. This is how it was done.

It’s hard to see this and even harder to see our own pyramids and skyscrapers. We all have accomplishments that were effort over time, that resulted in amazing things in our lives, that we brush off or drop from our memories too readily.

We’ve cared for children or elderly over many years. This helped launch humans into the world and make the exit of it happier or safer. We’ve made professional progress that added up to a career of knowledge and expertise. We’ve become skilled at endless things and if anyone asked us how we did it, we’d think for a moment and say the same thing. “You just have to start somewhere and keep at it.”

The night I returned home from NY I took my trash cans to the end of my driveway for trash pick-up the next day. I wheeled my cans in the dark while most people slept — I had the place to myself. It was lovely and quiet except for the crickets, which I listened to with gratitude. Cities are loud. I looked up at the moon, bright white in its waxing gibbous phase as it moved to round and full soon.

I know about the phases of the moon thanks to meticulous observations made well before recorded history, which then continued through the ancient Greek times when astronomers kept careful track of the moon, sun, stars, time, shadows, and shapes related to that which exists far from Earth. The telescope was invented in the 1600s and modern-day observational astronomy took off. Now I can gaze at the moon happily knowing what took thousands of years to study and document.

We’re crazy amazing, we are.

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Be well, friends.