The glass-half-full metaphor

The glass-half-full metaphor is fatally flawed if we conceive a glass too literally, as a “bottomed” container being filled from the top, especially from some external faucet that isn’t an integral part of the container. It’s not the nature of a container to itself be the source of its filling.

YOU are not a container.

Your nature is NOT to collect external contents from external sources. That means it’s NOT natural for you to receive and contain external material—feelings, opinions, judgments.

Even scholastic learning feels unnatural to us: Rote memorization is a capability we have, yes, but so do many things, living and non-living. We are not a notepad or book. When we are learning best, we are taking in material, then filtering and re-crafting it through who we are, so it settles best into our nature, and we re-present it to the world with our own creativity stamped upon it anew. It is our nature to re-create and *relate*, from the Latin for “to carry back.”

Think about how excruciating it is to undertake authentic transformation. Kicking a bad habit or way of thinking. We can consult self-help sources and have therapeutic counseling, but nothing about those transformation guides ever sticks until we make that guidance our own. Until we let it settle unconsciously and naturally into our individual nature.

We can grasp wise nuggets intellectually as brilliant. But they don’t come alive for us by any uses of our intellects. They are just another external guidepost which usually signals our failure to measure up. There is no debate. You can reject the science of addiction recovery, but your denial doesn’t change anything. Not a single human who has ever lived has re-formed or transformed themselves by thinking. By intellect.

You are a *feeling* and *action* machine. Containers do neither. Nor do notepads, books, or disk drives. It is our nature to *relate*, not contain.


Neil D. 2020-06-11

Related: Glass Half… What?

Published by Neil Durso

Just another mid-lifer sharing the journey...

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