I took this photo Saturday morning because I liked how it looked. My children and I ducked into a local beverage shop to grab a milk tea when I noticed it.

I was only thinking of the interesting stairs and the lighting at the time, but when I looked back at the picture later, I thought about all the different things stairs are said to symbolize.

In the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son,”stairs are a metaphor for life: “well, son, I’ll tell ya. Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair…” and then she goes on to describe bare stairs with splinters and tacks.

Zig Ziglar once said, “there is no elevator to success; you must take the stairs.” Martin Luther King Jr once said, “Faith is taking the first step, even when you can’t see the whole staircase.”

Stairs can symbolize hardships, perseverance, and uncertainty, but if we keep climbing, we can reach the top.

What inspired you this weekend?