Marks' Remarks

Good things happen slowly. That's not universally true, of course, but it's true enough to wonder if there is a structural explanation. Construction usually requires sequential elements of assembly, whereas destruction can be done all at once. Again, it’s our national tragedy of hurricane Ike which took lovely neighborhoods between League City and Galveston, neighborhoods built on stilts, built of quality materials, and reduce them to piles of flotsam on a sandy spit. That is a tragic illustration of what I’m about to write.
Early researchers in artificial intelligence came across an explanation, a phenomenon they called hill climbing.(1) Imagine a mountain range of opportunities, where the higher you get, the greater the advantage. Hasty opportunists will never get past the foothills because they pay attention only to the slope of the ground under their feet, climb quickly to the immediate hilltop, and get stuck there. Going downhill holds no attraction for hasty opportunists, even though the beautiful peaks lie beyond. Patient opportunists take the longer view to the distant mountains and toil through many ups and downs on the long trek to the heights.
Our new building project is large. It takes time. This month, the building committee has approved the processing of contracts with engineers, realtors and architects. The peaks beckon.

(1) --Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 156.