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"      There was something strangely beautiful about that video of the Metrodome&amp;#039;s roof collapsing under the weight of a heavy snowfall. Those first small tears and showers, whispers of what was to come, and then the inevitable larger, grander failure, the giant hole and the great torrent of snow that came crashing down, and there it was, at five o&amp;#039;clock in the morning: one of the great buildings in Minneapolis, with all the air let out of it, in less than thirty seconds. Watching a building coming down is more than a physical exercise; it&amp;#039;s a spiritual one. Our buildings dwarf us. They tower hundreds of stories into the sky, tall enough that we have to engineer them to sway in the wind. They&amp;#039;re big enough to house jumbo jets and corporations and governments. Even something like the Metrodome \u2014 considered outdated, a tenement to be fled \u2014 is a modern kind of miracle, with its Teflon-and-fiberglass roof held aloft by nothing more than circulated air and willpower. Someone dreamed that up, and then we built it. It&amp;#039;s really an incredible thing. And yet here is the painful-seeming truth about the things we build: It doesn&amp;#039;t take much to bring down even our monuments, and sooner or later, most of our buildings will become, by choice or by accident, some kind of dust. Nearly everything we build \u2014 nearly everything you saw on your way to work this morning, the roof that will be over your head when you go home tonight \u2014 will one day be gone. For some people, that&amp;#039;s a depressing thought: There will come a time when nothing we have done today will matter. For me, it&amp;#039;s always been a liberating idea: There will come a time when nothing we have done today will matter. Renovating our house, I&amp;#039;ve spent enough hours alone \u2014 and inhaled enough noxious fumes \u2014 to be able to reflect a lot about the universe and the mark we might have on it. There are times when our house seems beautiful and permanent, still dead level after 140 years, with its foundation made of stone and its massive beams and joists and its three layers of brick. Then I tear down another wall with only a hammer, a saw, and a spare afternoon. I&amp;#039;ve demolished the kitchen that I&amp;#039;m sure someone built thinking that avocado green would be in vogue forever. I&amp;#039;ve pulled out wiring that was once considered state of the art but now is deemed a fire hazard. I&amp;#039;ve stripped layer after layer of wallpaper that someone, at some time, took great care to put up, and then someone else came along and carefully covered. I know that 140 years from now \u2014 in far less time, more likely \u2014 someone like me will tear out everything that I&amp;#039;m about to put back into our house. I still want to get it right, of course. I still want to do my best with it. This will be our home, and I want to fall in love with it again every time I walk through the door. The improvements I&amp;#039;m making might be temporary \u2014 might one day be viewed as ugly and primitive, as the height of a former, wrong-headed fashion \u2014 but they will represent a permanent part of my lifetime. They will become memories one day, but those memories will be my children&amp;#039;s, and I want them to be happy. (And there&amp;#039;s always that one-in-a-million chance that we&amp;#039;ll build the Pyramids or write Twelfth Night, that we&amp;#039;ll create something that might actually last forever.) But through it all \u2014 through all the stress and the physical challenges, through the doubt and the bat infestations \u2014 there&amp;#039;s been another, more comforting voice whispering in my ear. All it will take is a heavy snowfall, or a bulldozer, or a strong gust of wind, and no one will ever know about the things I&amp;#039;ve done wrong. One day, even my biggest mistakes will be erased. A blank white sheet will be left in their place. That frees me. That frees me, the notion that I&amp;#039;m building not for a thousand years from now, but for right now, for us. It frees me to know that one day, a new, different, more incredible roof will replace this one, will be built over another family&amp;#039;s head, and they&amp;#039;ll look up and marvel at it for as long as it lasts, at the power of circulated air and willpower. MORE FOOTBALL ON MY SECOND EMPIRE: Rooting for a Winner, Against the Meatheads and More &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; PLUS: Follow My Second Empire on Twitter and Your RSS Feed for More on Re-Engineering a Life "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a9093/metrodome-collapse-video-4318860/?src=rss>