Oh The Monotony!

Metaphors of Monotony

       

A hamster wheel keeps the hamster busy and is a great form of exercise, but the hamster is still in his cage when the wheel stops spinning. A great metaphor describing why we need the power of NooDoo in our lives.
       

Too many times we are essentially human hamsters! We wish to break out of our self-imposed limitations. But we can never seem to reach the other side of our limits. Why? Because we are caught in a self-defeating cycle, doing the same thing over and over.
       

A treadmill is a great invention for helping you get some cardio, improve your health and burn some of those evil calories. But you could walk all day on a treadmill and still not move an inch ahead. The reason? Because you are literally walking on a loop.
       

"Okay, Captain Obvious, what's the point?," you reply. Simply this: the same principle applies to the metaphorical treadmill we call our daily lives. If we want to make any real headway in a particular area of our lives, we must step off our looping patterns and take a new approach.
       

The absurdity of clinging to self-defeating patterns can be seen by thinking about various real-world examples. Consider the following:

• watching the same movie or the same movie scene over and over

• watching reruns of a television show, or the same episode, over and over while missing out on the variety of other programming available

• reading the same book over and over to the exclusion of all other books

• reading the first chapter of a book over and over while ignoring the rest of the book

• reading one sentence or one paragraph over and over when there are so many more sentences and paragraphs to read

• buying a music CD of your favorite singer or band and only listening to one hit song while never giving any of the other tracks a chance

• a scratched CD that gets "stuck" on one part of a song

• trying to compete in a bicycle race by riding on a stationary bike, expending a lot of strenuous effort while making no progress

• an aspiring bodybuilder who lifts the same amount of weight, never moving up to heavier weights, while hoping to get bigger and bigger

• a restaurant that serves only one dish

• a church choir that only sings one hymn or only one verse of a hymn over and over

• a pastor who preaches the same sermon during every church service when there is so much more that the congregation needs to hear

• going to the same vacation spot year after year

• eating the same meal for dinner, night after night
       

While some of the aforementioned examples might seem ridiculous, well that's the point. The purpose of the list is to illustrate the absurdity of allowing ourselves to get caught up in confining patterns of behavior and actions which fail to get us what we want.

© Matt Decker

» This post is excerpted from my eBook  The Magic of NOODOO