3 Metaphors to Live By

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most applicable to daily life. Three of the most useful to me come by way of my husband, the airline industry, and Buddhism. Each functions literally, and each one works metaphorically for many situations in this life.

The first is from my husband. Pick your speed and drive at that speed; if drivers are slower, pass them; if others are faster, they can pass.

We seem to get into odd competitions over many things and often with little logic. Some have to do with speed -  how fast one can complete a task like lawn mowing, ironing, writing a report. Others, like how many hours to sleep, or what financial priorities should be, or what party to vote for can be the subject of dispute, not to mention the target of advertising.

It's not that we cannot be swayed by new and better information regarding our "speed" in life, or that we should choose anything which would endanger others or be illegal; rather it's that the competitions and discussions arising from personal differences often take on epic proportions and have little to do with facts. Simply "driving at one's own speed" without argument, judgement, or discussion works awfully well.

The second idea to live by comes from the airline industry. If the need arises, put on your own oxygen mask first, then assist others with theirs. 

We tend to feel selfish if we help ourselves first; how could a parent take care of his or her own breathing, leaving a child possibly to suffer, or worse.  We are told this on airplanes because children and others less able need us to be okay, so we can help them.

People pleasers and those who take on too much for others would do well to follow this advice. If they make themselves sick from overwork, they won't be of any help to anyone and most likely will make things worse. We have to be able to breathe in order to be able to make sure others can.

The third idea is the teaching tale called the empty boat, from Buddhist tradition. In this story, a man is in a boat on a river, and another boat begins to careen wildly toward him. As the boat increases speed and zeroes in on the man, he waves his arms, swears, yells, and becomes very angry with the driver of the other boat. He wonders who would want to kill him and how anyone could behave like that; he gets himself very worked up. As the boat narrowly misses him, he sees that it is a driver-less boat. His upset with the other driver was moot. Buddhist tradition does not mention anything about blood pressure!

There is a stretch of road near my home that changes from two lanes to one after an intersection. For blocks before that intersection, drivers jockey for position, wanting to be first in the single lane. I used to get caught up in this sometimes, until I began to notice how often the other driver turned off and wasn't aiming to beat me to the intersection at all. "Empty boat," I would say to myself. One has to be so foolish only a few times before the "empty boat" comes to the rescue.

The book All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum preceded me by a couple of decades with the idea that some of the best advice for living comes from very basic situations. These three work for me.

Drake Bennett

In his Boston Globe article "Thinking literally," staff writer Drake Bennett discusses studies by cognitive scientists/psychologists who believe that metaphor has a physical basis.

Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with...What they have found is that, in fact, we do.

In the studies that Bennett cites, there seems to be a huge bias towards finding the physical basis of metaphor. Admittedly, I haven't seen the studies; however, there is no mention of an opposite experiment which could prove, well, the opposite - that our physical sensations are shaped by our thought.

For example, Bennett writes:

Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person--rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring--than the iced coffee group.       

The basic claim:

"without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us."

Thus, and only thus, are we able to understand the world, according to Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

What if the experimenters described the personality of a person as happy, generous, sociable, good-natured, and caring. Then, subjects could be asked to hold a cup of tepid coffee and asked to describe its temperature, perhaps on a scale. Possibly, the description of the person would influence the perception of the temperature.

Maybe the mind's ability with abstraction enables us to make sense of position, size, temperature, and weight.

Do we see/perceive what we believe, or do we believe what we see/perceive? 

See Rebecca Bird's discussion "Language and Perception of color among the Ancient Greeks"  and "Proof Positive that People See Colors with the Tongue" (NYTimes Mar,1999) by Henry Fountain.


Bennett does a good service by elucidating these experiments and questions.

I would like to invite Drake Bennett to my soiree - I'm not so sure about the psychologists!