Spirit Camp 2015: Taps.

Faith, hope and prayer must never appear in the lexicon of a designer. Materials have no compunction to do you a favour; they’re best viewed as immoral. In fact one begins to see God’s problem in creating man. Over three Spirit camps I’ve tried to fix the knee operated automatic water valves for the four hand-wash stations. The first camp was taken up understanding how they worked and believe me that’s not obvious. The second was spent postulating and testing various theories as to why they didn’t. I mean they did but not reliably. This year began similarly. Now one assumes as they’re manufactured and sold in a nice box etc they are designed to work reliably but in this case the designer had faith and hope: Faith that a small o-ring would not compress under constant pressure and hope that it would magically centre itself into a small hole to cut the supply off. Obviously magic is another no-no concept to the designer. A good design must give zero alternatives to a mechanism other than to work. These valves had several and have now been junked for ordinary taps. This raises an interesting philosophical point. If, as is supposed, God or Spirit gave man free will might the master designer junk his protégé as an unsuccessful prototype if we prove unreliable? A salutary thought. Might he not appreciate our faith, hope and prayer approach and prefer we follow his own design philosophy of the rigorous application of truth and reality to create our best solutions? I know no better focus for contemplation than the simple phrase, “Everything is.” Its linguistic simplicity allows it to go any and everywhere without building a complexity of manuals, codes and beliefs. And of course magic.