The Carrier Below

On load paths, responsibility, and remembering what carries us.

After my accident, I noticed my mind would freeze. At first I thought it was simply reduced capacity: less ability, less resilience, less room to think. But over time I realised the freeze was not random. It usually happened when the carrying lost order — when there were too many unresolved dependencies, too many competing demands, and too many things trying to occupy the same space in my mind at once.

I can carry a lot when the order is clear. I can carry very little when the order collapses. That matters, because we often talk about stress as if the problem is simply load: too much work, too much pressure, too much responsibility. But I don’t think that is always right. Sometimes the problem is not the size of the load. It is the lack of order in how the load is being carried.

I see this in architecture and engineering all the time. I am working on a three-storey house at the moment with large steel beams and big spans, and you don’t solve that by simply putting in the biggest beam. A bigger beam adds weight. That weight increases the load on the lower floors, affects the foundations, changes the seismic requirements, and alters the whole structure. The design has to be specific to the job: enough capacity, clear load paths, and the right support in the right place.

More capacity is not always better if the load has no clear path. Sometimes the better answer is to reduce what does not belong, clarify the dependencies, and stop pretending everything can resolve into one person.

One of the simplest things that has helped me understand this is lying on the ground. Not as a technique, and not as a performance of rest. Just lying there. It puts the body in a position where the mind cannot pretend it is fully in control. Standing feels active. Sitting at a desk feels productive. Working, parenting, managing projects, and responding to problems all carry the posture of responsibility: I am carrying this.

But lying on the ground says something different. It reminds me that I am being carried. It changes the order.

In a building, a beam carries a floor. A column carries the beam. A foundation carries the column. The ground carries the foundation. Each part is genuinely carrying something, but none of them are the final carrier. The carrying is nested.

I think people forget this. We start acting as if everything resolves into us: the parent, the worker, the provider, the organiser, the one who has to hold it all together. But that is not how any stable structure works. A beam that tries to act like the foundation will fail, or it will force the rest of the structure to compensate for a bad design.

Lying on the ground reminds me of the actual order. I do carry things. I carry work, family, responsibility, decisions, and consequences. But I am also carried — by the floor, by gravity, by realities beneath me that are easy to forget because they are always there.

Being carried does not remove responsibility. It puts responsibility back in scale. I am not the foundation of everything. I am one carrier within a larger order of carrying.

And when I remember that, the carrying changes.

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Retrace note, added July 2026.

Builds on: The Carry