YOU CAN'T ALWAYS BUILD ON SOLID GROUND

Foundation is the most important thing in life.  It's your underpinning, your support, your starting point.  Almost everything, including a house, is built on a foundation.  We'll use houses as a metaphor here because most folks live in them, know a little about foundations.  I've even heard it said that a house is only as good as its foundation, but it might surprise most folks that most houses aren't build on perfect foundations.  Houses settle over the years, despite attempts to make sure the house in built on a solid foundation.  The foundation itself might be well constructed but the earth under it is the problem sometimes.  

I walk around my 20 year old house from time to time and check the brickwork to see if cracks are developing.  I watch walls on the inside for separations, check other things, and that's mostly for my own self-satisfaction.  There's not much I can do about it if cracks develop.  Most people live with them because that's just part of home ownership.  Some parts of the country presents big problems for foundation builders because of rocky soil, or sandy soil, or hillside property, or whatever.  Put plainly, housing foundations are problems when you make bad choices about where to build the home.  It's either choose another spot to build on, or turn to technology to take care of the problem.  Live in San Francisco, for instance, and you've got to consider earthquakes, and builders know how to prepare for that.  You can't hold off on building your house sometimes because the foundation is going to be a problem.  You can't always build on solid ground, and that's true of lots of things we do in life.

I decided many years ago to become a college professor, and I didn't have the foundation for it.  I'd never been a particularly good student, had not developed good study habits or a work ethic, and I didn't know much.  In being a poor student, I'd missed out on learning a lot of the basics most students in my class already knew.  Fortunately, I had a good mind and was able to catch up . . . and I did become a college professor, even without the best of foundations.  If a man goes to prison, decides to build a new life for himself once freed, he's going to be hard pressed to do that due to foundation problems.  Turning his life around is going to be double hard because he's got to start somewhere, and that means he's going to be building on ground that's a long way from solid.  

I'm sure you're thinking, "Well, what's your point?"  Should a person just give up on certain things because he can't find a good starting point, a good footing?  No.  It does mean, however, that he's got to understand that he's starting with disabilities because that lack of solid ground is going to cause problems somewhere down the road.  At some point in time, that foundation is going to need some attention, some shoring up, some restructuring.  The good news is that by then you've already got a good house going for you, something worth saving.  And if it isn't, you're always better prepared by the to move to a better house, or perhaps to better footing where a good foundation can be built.  The message here is that few people pick the perfect spot the first time.  What counts is getting started.