How the Little Signs in Life Have Much Bigger Meaning

How many times have you heard someone say, "Please, just give me a sign!"? Often, what follows is a subtle sign that the person misses while they're waiting for a shooting star or to be struck by lighting. Most of the time, our lives seem mundane and full of the "ordinary." What we don't realize is that some of the most seemingly ordinary occurrences in our lives are vehicles to the sacred. If we're paying attention, they can connect us deeply and profoundly to our center, to our soul.

How many of us miss those little "signs" in our lives, those little psychic pushes in one direction or another, while we're waiting for something dramatic or wonderful to happen to steer us down the path of life? We're looking outward or upward, instead of inward. In college, a professor said the words: "Life is metaphor". My entire body became a tuning fork resonating with that phrase. I understood it and believed it, but it wasn't until recently that I started truly seeing and applying this idea, watching it at work not only in my life, but in the lives of others around me.

To see the world metaphorically, you have to be paying attention to both the physical world and to what's going on internally. You have to recognize that metaphor is about meaning. While you shouldn't concretize it, metaphor can make your life richer and fuller. I've often seen metaphor working in the lives of others. A co-worker of mine, Cathy, had been talking for weeks about whether or not she should move in with her boyfriend. He was very eager and insistent, but she had been debating, unsure of whether she wanted to make that kind of commitment.

One day I was in an area of our workplace that was without a clock, and just casually, I asked her if she had a watch. She told me no, but then proceeded to relate an entire story about all of her watches. Apparently, every single watch she owned had stopped on the same day! Knowing her life circumstances, I was struck instantly by a metaphoric meaning in this. Curious to see if she saw it as well, I asked her, "I wonder what that's all about?" She just shrugged.