Talk Story
Politics is like life --
or maybe baseballI'M looking out my window watching the winter rain fall and trying to make sense out of a Legislature that proposes to spend a million dollars to get out of a traffic camera deal it just approved last session.
It occurs to me that legislation is like winter rain -- we always have too much or not enough. Was there ever a year we didn't have either a drought or a glut?
"Legislation is like winter rain" is a metaphor, a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another. Metaphors compare dissimilar things that have an underlying commonality. Supposedly, they improve understanding.
For example, Forrest Gump says in the movie, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you will get."
Like, wow.
Baseball is often used as a metaphor for life. Poet George Chidester wrote "In baseball it doesn't really matter what you do today, in the long run, it's what you do over a season, or a career. In that, baseball is a metaphor for life."
On the other hand, Mary McGrory wrote "Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become."
PEOPLE get carried away with this metaphor thing.
An online scan of metaphors for life turns up juggling, surfing, the Tour de France, gardening, a sea voyage, house construction, frying donuts, a stroll down a hazardous sidewalk, woodworking ... bowling?
I can understand donut frying -- "Plunge the batter into the fryer's searing heat and what emerges is beauty, a metaphor for life if ever there was one," gushes a donut maker -- but bowling?
Bowling is iffy, admits Internet user "Fitznorway."
"You know, I've come to realize something," he writes. "Life ... life is a lot like bowling. Here's the problem, though. I'm not quite sure HOW life is like bowling, or how bowling is, vice versa, like life."
It has "something to do with life being all round and spherical, with swirliness or without, but occasionally having holes in it, and rolling around through existence knocking things over and making big noises, big sweet striking noises.
"Or something like that. I'm working on it."
Delilah, a belly dancer, writes: "Dance is a metaphor for life. ... The process of learning to dance can also bring us information about living our lives, if we allow it to."
Cooking, too, is like life, says Grace Young, author of The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen.
"My parents' approach to cooking is Zen-like: attentive to detail and masterful. They are not formally trained in cooking, yet they share a passion for food that is common among many Chinese. They have great esteem for the meaning and symbolism of food as well as respect for age-old remedies.
"The everyday rituals of properly selecting produce, slicing meat, washing rice and presenting a meal, which I have inherited from my family, have given me an aesthetic insight into life. The slow emergence of these truths has allowed me to see the meaning of my own cooking as a metaphor for life."
Marty McGee is author of the book "Llamas and Alpacas as a Metaphor for Life."
"This is a book for everyone," he insists. "People who love llamas and alpacas or people who love people who love llamas and alpacas.
"If you have ever tried in vain" -- and who hasn't? -- "to explain why you have changed your life to accommodate your woolly buds this is the book for you."
"Learning math is a metaphor for life," according to mathmatters.net. "Many times when faced with new math topics, students feel lost, frustrated and want to quit. They can only succeed if they risk stepping into unknown territory and persist with the struggle to learn."
Like baseball, golf is almost worn-out as a metaphor for life.
Sports psychologist Paula King says it best: "Each journey through 18 holes of golf provides abundant opportunity to face down inner fears, to notice if your values are aligned with your behaviors, to display courage when the going gets tough, to define success in a manner that reflects the best of who you are, to call upon your skills to overcome obstacles and hazards, and to develop new skills based on new experiences."
Golf is like being a legislator.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.