Landings

I've come up with a new metaphor for life. No, I don't mean new to the world, because I'm sure somebody else has thought of this before, but new to me. Possibly new to a few acquaintances, definitely not new to my parents, who seem to have grown exponentially wiser every year since I hit eighteen.

On to my metaphor: Life is like the stairs in a skyscraper. Every time you hit a landing, there are more freaking stairs. And because it's life, the elevator is broken, and there's no escalator, and teleportation has still not been invented so that's right out.

So you start on the first floor (basement more accurately, but I'm not going to elaborate on the birth comparison there), and then you start walking up. It gets harder and harder, because let's face it, nobody is in good enough shape to climb 128 flights of stairs and not get a little winded. When you hit the late teens/early twenties, it gets really hard, because your body hasn't numbed itself to the labor yet, and the landings are both a blessing and a curse.

The landings are a pause, a place you can stop if you need to catch your breath, and curse the invention of stairs. They are not a conclusion, or a stop, or what you've been looking for and reaching toward, but you can stop there if you want. They're temptation.

I've hit my landing. Really the first landing I've had in about four years, and I've had my pause. I've rested, thought about just hanging out in the stairwell and maybe chain-smoking the time away until somebody installs a convenient elevator, and now I'm climbing again.

Mostly because I'm kinda claustrophobic and not nearly patient enough to wait for an elevator.

And partly because the climb is growing on me.