Tag Archives: Panama Canal

Metaphors Filled with Uncertainty

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about normal everyday stuff. Stuff people usually talk about to kill time while waiting for the bus or waiting for their turn at the dentist office. Of course, you want the bus to hurry up and come, but you usually want the dentist to do something else. The conversation kind of meandered into other things that we don’t normally talk about, I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in something like this. But as you sit there, and read this, you might begin to notice certain sensations in your body. Maybe pleasant sensations, maybe familiar sensations. Maybe some sensations that you hadn’t noticed up until now, like that feeling you have now in the lower portion of your left leg.

It’s like the other day, when I was browsing in a bookstore. It was a large bookstore, one that has over a hundred thousand titles. I happened to be in the self-development section. I wasn’t sure how I got there. I had started off in the music section and then moved on to the investing section, and then I’m not sure what happened after that. The next thing I realizes was that I was standing there reading a book about hypnosis. Now I’m not going to tell you that hypnosis is a fascinating subject, you’ve probably already come to that conclusion on your own. And they weren’t even aware of who was doing that, anyway. But one of the interesting things about hypnosis that you can use for your immediate benefit is the many ways in which it helps you to increase learnings about fascination.

Fascination is another subject that doesn’t get much attention. Sure, people feel fascinated by many things, but the actual subject of fascination doesn’t really get a lot of attention itself. Like the structure of fascination. What makes things more fascinating that other things? And some things can hold fascination really well for a long period of time, while other things are more of a flash in the pan for other ideas.

But my friend started to talk about sailing. He had recently bought a sailboat, and was planning on sailing around the world. Not really around the world, he wasn’t confident enough to venture across the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans, he was only planning on sailing down the east coast, through the Panama Canal, and then back up the west coast. I don’t know how he was planning on getting his boat back to the east coast, I guess that is a different story altogether.

But as we sat there, talking about things like those other ideas, we began to notice that some of the people around us were speaking a funny language. Almost as if we were automatically transported to a foreign country. I’m not sure if that has ever happened to you, but when you suddenly find yourself surrounded by people that are speaking a foreign language, it can be difficult to keep your thoughts in a single file line, waiting to take a number and sit patiently.

Of course, this might very well all be a jumbled mess of misplaced metaphors, but I suppose I’ll think about that later.