The Happiness Myth

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I am currently plowing my way through the book “The Happiness Myth - Why What We Think is Right is Wrong.” And I came across a most interesting metaphor proposed by the author to explain why we have certain behaviour patterns in our adult life. It’s probably the most descriptive metaphor I’ve come across….and it puts things in perspective that are usually blurry and hard to visualize. The metaphor is this:

“Consider that we all have an internal empty field at birth, and as we grow, we experience shocks in certain areas of the field, which we respond to by building up a great pile of stones in that spot, to protect ourselves from being hurt again. As time goes on, the inner field grows crowded with stone mounds. Moving around in such a field requires inventive choreogrpahy; and that dance is what a personality is. A person with alot of mounds is going to look pretty crazy when she tries to walk a straight line. When life circumstances change, the situation turns worse, since none of your long-developed shortcuts and coping methods work now. You crash into walls. The crashing makes you go to therapy, but you go to therapy looking for new shortcuts that will allow you to navigate your city of rock piles under these different circumstances, and what the therapist wants to do is bring you to the pillars and help you unpile the stones. There is nothing in the mounds to be scared of anymore, so if you can just budge the rocks, you will come to have free reign of your mind, and of the world, again.”

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