Sunday, January 5, 2014

Metaphor

So there's this guy named Ze Frank. About a year and a half ago he created one of my favorite videos ever to have graced the internet. If you haven't seen/heard me talk about it before here's the video.


It's chalk full of wisdom of things that I will pull out when I need them. But there was one part--the part about the metaphor--that always confused me. Why did Ze find metaphors so helpful to understand the world. I had always understood metaphors in literature, in art, because sometimes you have to talk about things that are so hard to talk about. But metaphors in real life? I didn't have any metaphors that I used to help me understand the world around me. The only time I used metaphors in real life was the sort of comparison metaphors used to make a point--nothing even remotely profound about that.

But in the last two or three months, I've gradually become aware of two metaphors that I use in the way that Ze describes. They are the Marathon metaphor and the Rule Book metaphor. Their names are kind of self-explanatory. The Marathon, I've already sort of described it in my video about Barcelona. I've been meaning to write a bit about the Rule Book, but it's essentially the idea that there is no rule book.

These ideas are pretty intertwined, and I haven't even spent enough time thinking about them to be able to explain them in depth. But they are pretty self-explanatory (I think) and, since they are metaphors, the best way to describe them is through the vehicle of their metaphor.

These metaphors, though, while I've only had names for them for a few months, have been around for a while. How many times have you heard someone say, "it's a marathon not a sprint."And how often do people mention the lack of a rule book/it's okay if it's not perfect when someone is torn over how to do something, or the possibility of doing something wrong.

And when I think about it, these metaphors have been present in my life, and I've been more or less aware of their ideas for at least the last three years. I used them/felt bad for not using them/forgot them/remembered them when I started trying to change my attitude and approach to school.

But then in Spain they came back to mind. These have helped me remember that it's not about perfection. They're the things I used to help me put things back into perspective. Things that helped me calm down when I felt to pressured to get everything right.

In New Zealand they're helping immensely, because I've arrived and my plans have promptly changed again and again and again, and with the usual challanges of coming to a new place, I've been needing to remind myself of them a lot.

What sort of metaphors do you use? What is your motto, your theme song? What ideas keep you grounded?

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