Metaphor
The man of words says you can think of life as a journey you travel through, your goals are destinations. You get there by routes, which are often difficult to navigate, requiring the help of guides.
You may consider life a passion play as Shakespeare did. Or maybe a dream that is never recalled when the dreamer awakens, to quote poet, Mark Strand.
Changing your metaphor, of course, is akin to changing your point of view. This is often useful because our point of view, the fact that we view something from a certain point, there's no such thing as the view from everywhere. This inherently limits the scope and depth of what we see. Changing your point of view allows you, in the least, to augment and, at times, entirely supplant your original view.
Competing metaphors help enrich and expand our knowledge of humanity. Piaget's view of the child as solitary scientist who learns about the world through manipulating objects was later augmented by Vygotsky's view, the child as apprentice in culture, learning through supportive interactions with other, more competent, members of society.
Changing your metaphor often amounts to changing your questions, useful because the quality of your life often depends on the quality of your questions. This notion is at the heart of much of psychotherapy.
Psychology Today
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