I never imagined I would have a chair attached to my staircase.
For most of my life, stairs were something I climbed without thinking. Airports, train stations, ancient fortresses, mountain villages, hotel lobbies, temples, castles, and countless homes around the world. Stairs were simply part of moving forward.
Then one day, they weren't.
A broken foot has a way of changing the meaning of ordinary things.
Suddenly, a staircase that I had climbed thousands of times became an obstacle. Not because it had changed, but because I had.
When the stairlift was installed, I wasn't excited. I wasn't proud. I wasn't even particularly happy about it. To me, it felt like one more reminder that life was asking me to adapt.
But over time, something shifted.
The chair was not a symbol of defeat.
It was a symbol of continuation.
It allowed me to remain in the home I love. It allowed me to move between floors independently. It allowed me to keep living my life while my body healed.
The older I get, the more I realize that independence doesn't always look the way we imagine it will.
Sometimes independence looks like climbing a mountain.
Sometimes it looks like accepting a helping hand.
And sometimes it looks like a chair quietly waiting at the top of the stairs.
The staircase never changed.
I did.
And perhaps that is what every stage of life asks of us, not to resist change, but to learn how to travel through it.