Lost in the Clouds or Down in the Well
When I attempt analogies about airplanes and collies.
The metaphor:
A few jobs ago, I went to a work retreat with a session on communication style. The facilitator told my boss and me that we were both indirect communicators: we were at risk of talking past each other without even realizing.
I mentioned this to a friend of mine a few weeks back, and she said, “Of course you’re an indirect communicator. You have an entire blog about metaphors.”
This floored me. I am always trying to be more direct: I say “clear is kind” so often at work, I’m known for it. I think of metaphors as ladders that help me access ideas I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get near. They are a handy exploration tool for when direct communication fails, a Plan B that keeps things from otherwise going unsaid.
I explained this to my friend defensively.
“Yeah, but like, being an indirect communicator isn’t a flaw or failing,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you avoid speaking directly. It just means you engage in implicit speech or figurative language.”
“...Like metaphors.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “Which you definitely do.”
Here’s a bit of a meta-story about a recent effort to find the right metaphor, where I tried a few different ladders to try and access an idea that was just out of reach.
The story:
Here’s what I wish I’d been told as a child:
Being a human is like flying a plane. You can control two levers, your expectations and your decisions. You have a whole dashboard of dials that tell you how it’s going, readings about how you feel and how others respond to you. You need training and experience to know how to decipher these dials, but over time, you can figure out what they mean and how to act on them, even how to anticipate what they’ll say in different environments.
A couple weeks back, I was explaining this to a relatively new friend, feeling sure he would agree with my insightful metaphor. Then I remembered that friend is a literal pilot. He flies real airplanes. I immediately started getting a dangerously high reading on my “embarrassment” dial and changed the subject.
This was the second time that metaphor had gone differently than expected. I’d laid it out to my partner Steve the day before, while we were pulling weeds in our garden. I waited for him to say I was brilliant. Instead he said, “Yeah, I don’t know about that.”
“The dials! They’re like your emotions!” I explained again.
“No, I get it – I just don’t relate to how mechanical it is.”
“The feelings?”
“The plane.”
It’s very unusual that the dials for my feelings say, “This is a great idea that makes total sense,” while Steve’s feedback is tepid. I chalked up his response as a fluke and resolved to try again soon with someone else. Cut to me ejecting myself from the conversation with the pilot. Back to square one.
I tried again with Steve the next morning, as we drove to our favorite running trail. “Okay, here’s another one.”
“Hit me.”
“Remember the show Lassie? You know how the dog is always running up to the adults, and they respond like, ‘What is it, girl? Is Timmy in the well?’”
“Yes?”
“Maybe your feelings are like Lassie. They show up unexpectedly and you have to figure out what they mean in order for them to be helpful. Otherwise they’re just, like, a barking dog, and you’re like, ‘Hush, Lassie! By the way, where’s Timmy?’”
I was feeling much less brilliant this time, but Steve considered it. “You know, I like that one.”
“Really?!”
“Yeah. Dogs barking. That feels closer.”
We started our runs, and I thought more about the Lassie frame. I liked how the metaphor captured the way feelings can be loud without being clear. Could it capture the additional dimension of multiple feelings, like the dials in my plane dashboard? Aha, I thought: maybe there are multiple dogs!
Take the feeling I struggle with at work, that I need to finish my task list before I end my day. Maybe Lassie’s not the messenger for that. Let’s say that’s a super-scary Doberman pinscher. If I don’t finish what I’d hoped to do that day, the Doberman goes crazy, snarling and barking that I can’t leave my chair til the tasks are done. The message is threatening – like, “Timmy may not be in the well today, but if you don’t check these off, he’s sure to fall in tomorrow.”
In any given day, as I begin to fall behind, I can start to hear that scary dog. My stomach tightens and I start to rush, trying to pack more in. I’ll stay online an extra 30, 60, 90 minutes, trying to check a few more things off – without thinking about what I’m not doing instead. Resting, reading, hiking, paddle boarding: maybe each of those priorities has its own dog, but they’re not as loud as the Doberman. He’s barking while they beg for belly rubs or quietly whine.
Or wait: maybe I couldn’t hear them because I wasn’t listening for them. Maybe the way I’d set my expectations made them inaudible to me – back to dials on the dashboard that I wasn’t checking or didn’t know how to read. Dials that would only be discernible with more training or a different mindset.
I met Steve back at the car. “I think the dog frame has some upsides, but I still prefer the plane. I think it’s really important that you can change both your expectations and your decisions.”
Steve got in the driver’s seat and looked at me. “What is this for?”
“The metaphor?”
“Yeah.”
I had to think about it. “I feel like there’s some sort of instruction I missed about how to put all the pieces of life together: how to navigate the day-to-day as a person. I feel like we get information about parts of life on their own: how to be a good friend, do well in school, manage money. But I am still figuring out how to balance all those things together…and I’m almost 40! I’m trying to sort of reverse engineer what would’ve been helpful to know earlier, like as a sort of orientation.”
Steve smiled in recognition. He knows I love orientations. I love well curated plaques in museum exhibits and descriptive wooden signs at scenic vistas. I love when someone walks me through how to do something and gives me written notes to refer to later. I do not like figuring it out for myself. I don’t like not knowing what’s happening or why.
I wrote back in February that I chose metaphors as my blog’s theme to explore what’s behind the many moments where my feelings catch me off guard. Sometimes, a dashboard dial goes haywire and I have to figure out why. Have my expectations been unrealistic – like, say, about the amount it’s possible to get done in a day? Do I need to do something differently – like getting offline on time, even if my tasks aren’t done? Or am I forgetting exactly who or what I can control, which of course, is only me?
I wrote that I like to collect and label the feelings from these moments – but I don’t exactly do it recreationally. I mount these moments like an entomologist pinning up bugs to feel a sense of groundedness, so I can reorient and operate deliberately. So I know what’s going on. And once I do, I like showing other people. Sometimes they see it similarly, and that’s validating to me, and maybe even helpful to them. Sometimes, it turns out we see things differently, whether different metaphors or different worlds. Then I take it back to the drawing board and try again. After all, someone’s got to save Timmy from that well.
The question: Have you found any helpful orientations to being a person?
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