Dropping Stairs

It's a funny thing when you are building your own stairs. The higher you build the stronger the foundation grows. But the first steps are so fragile, so fragile. So you build and build and the storm breaks and your stairs break and you drop down again and you build again and you drop down again and you build again and you drop down again and how much it hurts to drop once you've managed one or two or even three steps, almost there. Back on the hard floor again. Bruises multiplying on your skin.

So there must be a critical limit where the strength of the steps finally holds the weather and supports your own feet. Where you are reasonably safe and perhaps, when the wind inevitably blows or the tree falls down on your path, perhaps then you only break the very last step and perhaps not even that. Perhaps you remain standing high up, secure, ready to build higher, stronger.

It is a dream, that elusive limit. If it exists? Whether there is a danger zone just before? Where you are high enough for the critical fall, but not yet high enough for the critical strength? I don't think your chosen stair design factors into the probabilities. I don't think it matters where you build. This is a universal process.

Down here with the crooked nails and the splinters it is easy to understand those who've decided to just walk the bottom. But perhaps the process of building that first step over and over and over again makes your head stronger to be banged on the wall later. But please don't tell me the wall is actually real. Easier to imagine this boundless floor with infinite sky and limitless nails.