At dinner tonight, Alan Litwak expounded on the idea of the” ladder”, an artifact in the story of Jacob becoming Israel. My mind immediately began to think back on my experiences with ladders.  One of the most memorable was my hoisting up a thirty five foot ladder (it was aluminum and fairly light) and balancing it on my hand.  This proved to be an entertaining activity for this huge ladder was balanced so perfectly that I did not have to move about to keep the top directly over the bottom. And, thus I have given away the secret of balancing such things as chairs, tables, ladders and anything that can be held on your palm and keep it up in the air as long as you can bear the weight and do not tire of the achievement.

I have used the ladder on many occasions to show how balance is simple if you think of the object as having a top and you control the bottom, moving it in the direction the top wants to go.  But, the ladder is apropos of many other images that can be metaphorically useful.

The ladder can be thought of in terms of life.  We start on the bottom rung and work our way upwards – some of us reaching the top of a goal that is thought of as worthy.  Others get stuck somewhere in the middle and they are thought of or they think of themselves either as accepting or as failures depending on the context.

A good many of us are a bit bitter that we stopped off on a rung on that ladder and did not reach our potential.  Parents are best at expressing disappointment with children who never met or exceeded expectations.

Some people are convinced that each and every activity is a rung on a device that will someday take them to heaven. Ladders are sometimes thought as two directional – up and down.  The people who want to go to heaven believe there are Angels up there who sometimes come down to visit with us and perhaps stir us up.  I happen to believe that some people are angelic for they cannot be otherwise and some are evil and cannot be otherwise.  Angels are for those who believe in an afterlife.  I prefer to think that the ladder I perceived when younger took me in a direction that I could not fathom but I chose to be a teacher and then found myself helping children on different rungs trying to get them to see the possibilities of trying to go higher.

That ladder is a helpful device and I have always been comfortable with it.  There are those who are afraid to venture as high as standing on a chair to reach a light bulb.  I think it is a great way to get light to shine down on us unless you are tall enough to reach the roof.