If you’ve read this blog for a while or listened to our podcast, you know we love referencing Greg Lehman’s ‘cup’ metaphor. Simply put, it’s the idea that everything in your life goes into one cup, and sometimes, that cup can overflow.
Overflow isn’t even because of bad things—sometimes, life just gets too busy or overwhelming in positive directions. Imagine juggling a new promotion at work while planning a wedding and adopting a dog and moving into a new apartment while training for Leadville, for example. All of those things are generally good (one assumes), but all happening at once can be a lot. And something is likely going to have to give. Often, that comes in the form of injury or illness if we don’t catch it early enough.
For some people, the cup metaphor doesn’t quite hit home. So, when I had a dream the other night that really felt like an awesome explanation of the cup metaphor in a new way, I wanted to share it. That’s right, the Consummate Athlete is here talking to you about dreams.
Anyway. In this dream I had, there was a truck that was completely piled with stuff, and it was heading for this small bridge that it would have to pass under. On the truck bed, there was a large sofa that had been placed sideways, so that it was sticking out to either side. When I saw this truck heading for this tiny, one-lane bridge, my immediate thought was, ‘Oh no, that sofa is making it too wide to get through the bridge.’
And so the truck was stopped at the bridge, because of this sofa. Or at least, that’s what it seemed like at first.
But once the sofa was fixed—a very long, painstaking process in my dream—and the truck started to head through the bridge, it immediately got stuck. That’s because in addition to having the sofa sticking out on the sides, the truck was piled so high that it was also much too tall for the little bridge! The driver spent all of this time rearranging the one piece of furniture that had been sticking out to the side, causing the most obvious problem. But in doing that, he completely ignored the fact that even if the sofa was fixed, the truck still wouldn’t fit under the bridge.
I woke up elated about this dream, weird as it was. (I tried to explain it to Peter, and my spoken explanation did not do it justice. Hopefully this written version makes more sense.)
It seemed so profound: When we feel like our truck is over-packed (AKA, our cup is overflowing), we tend to fixate on the most obvious, glaring part that we can fix, or at least, fixate on. This is easy, right? It’s the big fight we had with a partner, the huge new stressor at work, the one project that we’re behind on, the injury we’re in the midst of rehabbing. But as we focus on that—the sideways sofa, if you will—we ignore the fact that we also have this huge pile of other stuff that’s causing issues as well. It’s just that those issues aren’t quite as obvious: The tiny niggle in the knee, the lower hours of sleep, the small projects that you’re also balancing at work, the school play you’re helping your kids with, et cetera. We can fix the big problem—turn the sofa in the right direction—but the other stuff will still be piled on.
And most of the time, you can’t just unload the truck and leave some stuff on the side of the road, to continue torturing this metaphor. Maybe some of it can go on the roadside with a giant FREE sign next to it, but a lot of it, we can’t part with. Hopefully there are a couple of big pieces that can get left behind or given away. Maybe we can rearrange the truck to make it more efficient, and to gain back some space at the top. But if we try to drive through that bridge with the truck piled as high as it is now, something is going to get damaged or fall off, and it might be something we don’t want to lose.
This metaphor works for me because (in addition to growing up by a railroad trestle with a 11′ height and watching A LOT of trucks get stuck under it), it’s a bit more tidy than the cup metaphor. In the cup metaphor, it’s all liquid going in and it can be hard to think about what should come out to stop the overflow. This moving truck piled with boxes and furniture feels more tangible, like I’m able to label each box with what it contains, and move them around like some kind of weird mental Tetris game. It lets me visualize leaving specific things behind, not just pouring out a few tablespoons from my cup. And when thinking about new projects, it lets me picture adding those boxes to the pile, and assessing how they fit.
So, if the cup metaphor never worked for you, consider thinking about your whole life in terms of a moving truck. How high is yours piled? Is there anything you can leave at the curb?
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