The Attack of the Metaphors

A old friend of mine used to chuckle about the observation that anything can be a metaphor for Life.  It’s true – take any situation or object that can be cast into positive and negative qualities, and *bang!* you have a metaphor for Life, because Life is also easily cast into positive and negative qualities.   For example, “Life is a movie.  Sometimes it’s Casablanca, sometimes it’s Howard the Duck.”  Obviously the pathway from the metaphor to its object can be more or less direct, but you get the picture.   This process has some very direct correlations to the concept of basis expansion in quantum mechanics, which I’ll save that for another post.  

I think this is the same process responsible for the sensation that the world is laughing at you when you have some dramatic cataclysm in your life.   For example, if you’ve ever had a bad break-up, you may have noticed that suddenly every damned song that plays in your vicinity is about love and pain.   Doesn’t matter how much you try to avoid it, these themes always come to find you.  Check out the movie Better Off Dead and you’ll see what I’m talking about.   I think this is because, when you’re feeling extreme emotion, your perceptions become polarized by that emotion, e.g. when you’re very sad, you resonate with (notice and empathize with) the happy or sad qualities inherent in everything you look at, and because (as a species) we’re so good at anthropomorphizing our surroundings, things that don’t normally register as having emotional content can take on those qualities.  (e.g. look at an electrical outlet and pretend it’s a human face.   do the same with the front grill of any car.)  From personal experience, this effect is self-reinforcing, until the emotions subside or an outside distraction reduces your tendency to view the world along those lines.   It’s a very difficult trench to break out of, but it seems to get shallower as you get farther away from the cause of the cataclysm.

I wish you the best of luck and strength, my friend – the road you’re stepping on has a bunch of potholes, but you’re a tough person, you have a ton of support, and you have the most beautiful children in the world (like every proud father).   I hope you discover that the hill is more gentle than you fear, and watch out for those metaphors – they aren’t really meant for you…