Building Wonders

One of the perks of the weird and wonderful life of the international athlete is the opportunity to see the world and take in some of the wonders that human kind has left behind throughout history. In just the past few months I’ve found myself wandering around Paris’s Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. And as I take in these sights—resplendent in their design, their color, their grandeur or, in the case of the Leaning Tower, their delightful idiosyncrasy—it makes me wonder what we’re building today. How are we adding to the wonders of the world?

The construction of massive and ornate buildings seems to be a trend of the past. Building the next great palace or pyramid would just be utterly pretentious and wasteful. But that doesn’t mean we’re finished creating grand and beautiful things. Maybe technology is our new canvas. Though it may often invite cynicism, you can’t deny the beauty in landing a rover on a comet hurtling through space or being able to talk to your family face-to-face from thousands of miles away. And for all the power it holds in its little frame, the iPhone stands just as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Maybe these feats in the exploration of human potential are the monuments that we’ll leave behind.

But I’d like to add one more suggestion—that maybe it’s time that we focused less on building things and more on building humanity. Let’s build love and trust and kindness. Let’s knock down inequality and hunger and hate. Instead of building structures that reach to the sky we can build movements that reach around the world. That’s what I want to leave behind. Let our children look around them at the prosperity and goodwill of humanity and declare it a masterpiece.

And maybe that all sounds like a naïve shout into the wind but wasn’t that true of every impossible thing we’ve ever achieved?

Happy New Year