Steps to Achievement

Everyone has a goal in life, and or some achievement to strive for.  This can range from working in your dream career, to running a marathon, or even climbing to the stop of a set of stairs.  The possible things that people can achieve are limitless, and can even be symbolic of the idea of achievement themselves.  This is the case for the stairs, specifically the stairs at the front of Atherton.

The Atherton steps are truly just a bunch of steps, I didn't count how many, that lead up to the doors of Atherton Hall from College Avenue.  Along the way there are many different lights, and foliage, and more than one different paths that you can take to climb the steps.  There are also a bunch of benches, and I'm sure it would be a really nice place to study if you wanted to.  Just like any staircase, the stairs start with a single step at the bottom.

To really get started toward your achievement, you have to take on the first step.  This first step is very simple, but extremely hard to take on.  The first step, is taking a first step.  By this I mean, that to truly start toward the achievement, you must first take action to try and achieve it.  Even though this is such a challenging step, it is still truly easy.  A wise man once said, (after he almost tripped up the stairs) "It's not that I can't, it's just that I have to get my foot on the step."  This quote shows exactly what taking that first step is like, anyone can do it, yet it is one of the hardest things for them to do.

As you walk up the steps, it can get tiring, but that should never stop you from trying to reach the top.  As you keep climbing up the steps, your achievement continues to grow as you go higher and higher.  Eventually, you will come to a landing.  This landing is the lull in the work toward your achievement.  You've worked hard, and you've made it far, but now you've leveled out.  The easy thing to do at this point would be to take the path that leads back down, and abandon your goal.  This may be the easy thing to do, but it is not always the thing that you should do. Most the time the best thing to do, is to keep on trekking up.

When you finally reach the top of the stairs you have finally achieved your goal of making it to the top or whatever else your goal was.  At this point it is important that the triumph of reaching the goal does not overshadow the journey.  It is importantly to look back and see where you have been and what you had to do to get where you are.

 In a speech, that I gave in High School, before I had every thought about creating this blog, I spoke about this idea of the stairs being an obstacle on our journey through life.  In this speech, I noted how almost everyone had fallen up the steps at some point in their life.  I spoke that, "We may have tripped on our way to the top [of the stairs] a couple of times, but by the time we reached the top, we were able to catch ourselves and stand on our own."  That is why I believe in the importance of stairs to the idea of achievement and why the stairs in Atherton are so important to this idea.