I recently built a small shed in my backyard. My plan for the “foundation” was to buy some concrete pavers, put some adjustable pedestals on top, and then put some 4x4’s on top of that.

Thanks to the adjustable pedestals, I wouldn’t need the pavers to be very level. Plus, I was building all of this on literal sand, so even if I got the pavers level they weren’t going to stay that way - good thing I can adjust! I started digging in February, and by September it was clear that this was a bad plan.

Sand walks around a bit more than I realized, but its motion is surmountable. What is not, is figuring out where the sand even is. I made no useful progress until October, when I finally screwed some lumber into a big floppy rectangle “retaining wall” bigger than the outside of the pavers, and started shoveling the sand out from that.

It wasn’t important because it kept the sand out, it was important because it told me where the sand was.

Was the sand level? I never did find out, really. But! Was the top of the retaining frame level? Yes! And, did I dig down flush with the bottom of the frame? Also yes! So the boundary of the dig is level, and from there it was only the inside I needed to worry about, and even that not very much because the shed walls all stand at the outside. Once the retaining frame was in place, it was shocking how quickly the rest of the shed went up, after making so little progress in the months prior.

I thought that a bubble level would give me a portal into the infinite fields of Level which surround us at all times. True enough, the Level gods spoke promptly and inexhaustibly through my buoyant oracle. But knitting these answers into something coherent was impossible until I could pin them onto a frame. A frame which took twenty minutes to build, but most of a year to even conceive of trying to build.

It’s almost tautologic to take a frame for granted. How do you find a missing frame? Heck if I know.1

But each night, I slept with my family, Inside, in our house. And it was remarkable how messy that house got as it underwent this little mitosis event to birth a new Inside. And even more remarkable that as soon as I had placed four boards on the ground, meeting only the feeblest definition of Inside, the rest of the shed relatively erupted out of the enclosed area.

I find myself now looking for all the other featureless plains that I’m wandering on accident. Looking for places to drive a stake. Or at least recipes for a raft that can be assembled in midair, referenced only to itself, but sturdy enough to hold a problem safely Inside. We’re all sitting upon and within dozens of such frames already, right now, what’s one more?