“How you arrange the plot points of your life into a narrative can shape who you are, and is a fundamental part of being human” – Julie Beck

When we think about metaphor, we might think about how we typically learn about metaphor in school: as a poetic device or a rhetorical flourish.

But, metaphors are not simply confined to the world of poetry, they are all around us. They are the reflection of us!

Metaphors have a way of relating to us in the most profound way, by clarifying immense truths and intricate lessons in fairly minimal space.

I was like, if people can actually see some vital truths and important info these metaphorical expressions passing to us maybe many misguided life wouldn’t have been so.

I wish to share more metaphorical stories in future to illuminate more minds for greater good!

My challenge for you today is to read the the metaphors below. See each of the metaphors from their uniqueness and take which angle affects you, make corrections, then live the best of your life.
Don’t just read this for the sake of reading, read it for the sake of learning.

 

 

8 Powerful Yet Simple Metaphors that Will Change the Way You Think

1. The Old Woman And The Bucket

Once upon a time, there was an elderly woman who needed to walk down to the river every morning to fetch water. She carried two buckets with her, filled them up at the riverbank, and walked back with them to her house.

One of the buckets was new while the second bucket was older and contained a few thin cracks that would leak water onto the ground as the elderly woman walked. By the time she arrived home, typically about one third of the water in the second bucket had leaked through its cracks.

One day, the crack bucket said to the elderly woman, “I want you to know that I’ve been leaking water every morning for the past several years.

I’m so sorry for being cracked and making your life more difficult. I understand if you need to replace me with a better bucket.”

The elderly woman smiled and replied. “Do you really think I haven’t known about your cracks this whole time?” she asked. “Look at all the beautiful flowers that grow on the path from my cottage to the river. I planted their seeds, but every morning it’s you who does the watering.”

The flower is an irony to your life, see the challenges in your life as a path to a greater good. Problem isn’t a treat to our life, it must and it’ll definitely occur. But how we see the problems in our life is what matter most!

You know at times, feeling good enough in life, in work, in business, and in our relationships has everything to do with how we personally judge the cracks in our own bucket.

Because we all have a few cracks: your own crack might be relationship problems, work issues, family dilemmas, or any other things that have been as cracks in your life. But are they cracks that wreck you, that taint you, and that ruin your experience and desirability?
Or do your cracks water a trail of flowers you haven’t even stopped to appreciate?

Choose to see the flowers through the cracks in your own bucket, choose to see how it’s exactly those cracks that make you good enough and your whole universe will shift!

2. The Weight Of The Glass

A wise man once said, reality is an illusion of the mind, what you perceive it depends on what you see and what affecting you depends on how long you hold on to it.

A professor entered a class with a glass of water and asked his students, how heavy is this glass of water I’m holding?
Students said, from a couple of ounces to a couple of pounds.

The professor said, “from my perspective, the absolute weight of this glass is irrelevant. It all depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute or two, it’s fairly light.

If I hold it for an hour straight, its weight might make my arm ache. If I hold it for a day straight, my arm will likely cramp up and feel completely numb and paralyzed, forcing me to drop the glass to the floor.

I each case, the absolute weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it feels to me.”
Analogically, the glass of water is in related with your life. Your worries, frustrations, disappointments, sorrows, and stressful thoughts are very much alike. Your life is affected as much as the emphasis you give.

Think about them for a little while and nothing drastic happens. Think about them a bit longer and you begin to feel noticeable pain. Think about them all day long, and you will feel completely numb and paralyzed, incapable of doing anything else until you drop them.

If you’ve been struggling to cope with the weight of what’s on your mind, it’s a strong sign that it’s time to put the glass down. Like I said in one of my articles, perfection isn’t the act of humans, and never let your mistakes, problems, rejections, failures deprive you from living your moment.

So, learn to drop that glass of burden in your life and embrace something great.

3. A Game Of Chess

Only the wise can play the game of chess!
Almost no one wins a game of chess by only moving forward. Sometimes you have to move backward to put yourself in a position to win. The same is true of life.

Because sometimes, when it feels like you’re running into one dead end after another, it’s actually a sign that you’re not on the right path. Maybe you were meant to hang a left back when you took a right, and that’s perfectly fine.Life gradually teaches us that U-turns are allowed.

So turn around when you must! There’s a big difference between giving up and getting yourself moving in the right direction again.

Don’t be directionless, life isn’t all about moving but moving in the relevant directions. Backwardness isn’t an awkwardness, learn to move back when necessary than moving forward in the wrong direction!

4. The Elephants And Manhout

The ancient elephant trainers used to strap a thin metal to chain a grown elephant’s leg and then attach the other end to a small wooden peg that’s hammered into the ground.

The elephant could easily uproot the wooden peg and escape to freedom with minimal effort. But it doesn’t. In fact, the elephant never even tries. The world’s most powerful land animal, which can uproot a big tree as easily as you could break a toothpick, remains defeated by a small wooden peg and a flimsy chain.

Why? Because that was how the elephant was treated when it was a baby, its trainers used the same methods to domesticate it. At the time, the chain and peg were strong enough to keep the baby elephant. When it tried to break away, the metal chain would pull it back. Soon the baby elephant realized that trying to escape was impossible.

So it stopped trying. And now that the elephant is fully grown, it sees the chain and the peg and it remembers what it learned as a baby—that the chain and peg are impossible to escape. Of course, this is no longer true, but it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter that the two-hundred-pound baby is now a ten-thousand-pound powerhouse. The elephant’s self-limiting thoughts and beliefs prevail.

We are all like elephants, if you think of it clearly. We all have incredible powers inside us. And we have our obstacles dragging us down from stretching to reach our full potential, the self-limiting thoughts, and beliefs that have been with us from childhood, the idol.

The importance of this is that though you need to learn from the past but you should never allow yourself to be stuck in the past. You should be willing to change your assumptions and perspective about the way things are now. Life is not static, so, learn to live and move in a dynamic with it.

5. The Orange Taste

At times the way we judge people, things, or situations in our life is drastically based on our perspective or how we expect the thing, people, situation to be rather than how things are in themselves.

Imagine you had a ripe, juicy orange sitting on the table in front of you. You pick it up eagerly, take a bite and begin to taste it.
You already know how a ripe, juicy orange should taste, and so when this one seems to be different you feel a sense of disappointment and swallow it, feeling cheated out of the experience you expected.

Or maybe the orange tastes normal, nothing special at all about it. So, you swallow it without even pausing to appreciate its flavor, as you move on to the next unworthy bite and the next.

So, in the first scenario, the orange let you down because it didn’t meet your expectations. In the second, it was too plain because it met your expectations.
That is how many of us live our lives… unhappily.

That’s why so many of us feel let down, disappointed, and unexcited about almost everything. Because nothing really meets our expectations.

The orange is, of course, analogous for almost everything in your life: any event, any situation, any relationship, any person, any thought at all that enters your mind. If you approach any of these with expectations of “how it should be” or “how it has to be” to be good enough for you, they will always disappoint you in some way……… Expectations from people will only make your life miserable, from one disappointment on to the next disappointment or unworthy life experience, and the next, and the next………

Until you’ve lived the vast majority of your life stuck in an endless cycle of experiences you barely like or barely even notice.

Expectation is an obstacle generating problems or conflict must people face in life though there are some certain things which we expect people to be this way or that way, you should know that too much expectation is a threat to your happiness. So, see things as they are not how you expect them to be.

 

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6. Dog and the Bone

I was walking by one afternoon and I noticed this Dog carried bone in front of me. The dog wanted to cross the road, on the verged of crossing road there was a car with high speed facing it and as the dog was crossing, the bone it carried was limiting its speed, just a niche for the car to hit it, the dog had to let go of the bone to increase its speed from getting hit.

why? Despite the dog’s love for bones! Despite its efforts to carry the bone cross the busy road!

Because It sees obstacles not in the bone but In itself for still holding on to what is threatening its life. The bone was a death trap, not a blessing and it realized that only the living can eat more bones!

Some of us, our life is like this, there are some bones that are wrecking you from growing, moving forward in the right direction, delaying your success, or nearly getting you killed. You need to let go of such bones.

It might be the bone of family, work, relationship, society, and so forth, you need to let go of them for your life to be meaningful. You don’t hold on to something that doesn’t give you value in life.

The more you hold on to them the more danger you invite to your life!

 

7. Only Water Around You

At times in life most of the things we desperately try to hold on to, as if they’re real, solid, everlasting fixtures in our lives, aren’t really there. Or if they are there in some form, they’re changing, fluid, impermanent, or simply imagination in our minds.

Life becomes a lot easier to deal with when we understand this riddle!

Imagine you’re in the middle of a large pool blindfolded, and getting to the edge of the pool is your goal but with your struggle to grab the edge of the pool you think is near fails, the edge isn’t near is far away from you. All this seems to tire you because the edge you think is near is an imaginary thing in your mind.

Until you calm yourself down and realize that there’s nothing nearby to hold on to. Just you and the water around you.

Then, you can decide to continue struggling aimlessly or accept the fact surrounding you: there’s only water around you nothing nearby to hold on to.
I’ve seemed many people subjected to this kind of metaphorical expression.

They seem to have put much relaxation on people without accepting the fact that it’s them and the circumstances surrounding them, they seem to hold on to the edge which doesn’t seem to exist. They relied on fake promises to build their future and forget the fact that human help is imaginary. The quicker we realize this in life the better our life would be.

Today, I challenge you to ask yourself:

What are you desperately trying to hold on to in your life that is affecting you?
Then imagine the thing you’re trying to hold on to doesn’t really exist. Free yourself from the bondage of obscurity.

8. The Mind Is A Muscle

Our subconscious mind is the driving force of our life. I believe strongly in the power of inner thought, very soon I will give something about it.

Think about the most common problems we deal with in our lives, from lack of presence to lack of exercise to unhealthy diets to procrastination, and so forth. In most cases, problems like these are not caused only by a physical ailment, but by a weakness of the mind.

Just like every other part of the body, our minds need to be exercised to gain strength. I do tell myself if there is any aspect human beings that needs serious attention is the mind. It needs work to grow and develop over time. As I said, mind is the propelling force of human beings. Achievements, failures, progress, success, procrastination, determinations, and so forth are all rely on our mind structure!

Just like the every other part of the bodily, mental strength is built through lots of small, daily victories. It’s the individual choices we make day-to-day that builds our “mental strength” muscles. We all want this kind of strength, but we can’t wish our way to it. If you want it, you have to create positive daily rituals in your life that reinforce what you desire.

You don’t just wake up and expect things to work themselves out, you build your mental strength as you build every other parts of your body.

Which metaphor above resonates the most with you right now?

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.