I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreoever, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
I find myself using metaphors in my thought and expression regularly, without being aware I’m doing so.
After I left my corporate technology job in April of 2024, I started a blog, The Reinvention Project. Reinvention is a metaphor for how to understand — and drive — changes in a life.
Reinvention implies the existence of a product, a business, an institution, one that needs to be evaluated and then remade. Using reinvention for what I intended to do with my life said that something about it was no longer suitable or appropriate, that I needed to conceive a replacement, and that I am responsible for creating a replacement that “works” in some sense. It suggested that eventually there should be a recognizable and dare I say legible (to use another metaphor) new version to present to the outside world.
The language of reinvention brought the corporate world’s expectations into the life I wanted to build after.
But there are other metaphors I might use to describe what happens next:
- I could be on an ocean journey to a far-off land that I’ve never visited before
- I could be cultivating the garden of my life, preparing the soil, planting seeds, watering the ground, deadheading old blooms, picking off japanese beetles, and enjoying the flowers that resulted, briefly, before drying out and dying.
- I could be painting over the canvas of my life, creating a palimpsest of what came before and what’s beautiful now
- I could be writing the next chapter of my life as story, showing how my character continues to evolve and meet new challenges
In thinking and communicating about lives, we often default to metaphors that may or may not serve us. “I’m falling behind” implies you are in a race or competition with other people. “I’m not where I should be” suggests that life is some sort of scheduled tour. “I have too much baggage,” says that life is a burden to carry. “Life has cheated me” says that life is like a person who has deliberately made my life worse. “I’ll take my chances” means that life is a gambling game.
More explicitly choosing the metaphors you rely upon to understand your life and guide your thoughts and action can help you feel better, and live life the way you want to, not just by default.
One of my favorite metaphors right now for making sense of my life and helping me decide “what next” is the idea of my life as a work of great literature. What implications does this have? It says that struggle and challenges are necessary for living a good life, not something to be avoided or wished away. It suggests that as I meet these struggles I can evolve and change, in interesting ways. It says that a good life is made up of the joyous and the terrible, not simply the happy and the successful. It says that other “characters” in my life are fully themselves and have their own stories playing out (because a good work of literature fully fleshes out many characters, not just the protagonist).
Whatever metaphor you’re operating under right now, it’s useful to acknowledge it to yourself. It may be helping you but it also may be limiting you, keeping you from seeing opportunities that are might surface if you tried a different one.