The Golden Gate Bridge, connecting the city of San Francisco with Marin County by spanning the Golden Gate Strait, is one of our world's most recognizable landmarks. Its red, wiry structure is a remarkable symbol of connectivity, of the feats that humans can achieve through collaboration and intelligence.

It's also the second-most popular destination in the world for people to kill themselves. Roughly once every two weeks, a person caught in a dark web of isolation, depression, and hopelessness chooses to climb over the protective guardrails and jump, plummeting a total of 250 feet down, down, down into the cold waters of the strait. When they reach the bottom, they're traveling roughly seventy-five miles per hour. Most people die upon impact.

There was a suicide note collected a few years ago that was written by an anonymous person as they made their way to the Golden Gate Bridge. The writer remarked that he was walking to the bridge with the intent of ending his life; but one sentence of the note immediately leapt out at me.

"If one person smiles at me on the way," this person wrote, "I will not jump." He jumped.