Looking for the key of a reverse-engineered ladder

[robinturner]

I'm quite fond of the productivity/personal growth blog Zen Habits; in fact, I have it as one of my home tabs on my work computer. On the other hand, some of the guest writers make me nostalgic for the old days when you could only get published by having an actual publisher, who would in turn employ copy editors to make sure the authors that were published did not write garbage. "Breaking a Bad Habit Shatters the Rung Beneath You" by no means represents the worst of its genre; what flummoxed me was the number of comments praising the author on his writing style, which, as you can guess from the title, is neither lucid nor succinct. The central image is of life as a ladder (which he sometimes contrasts with a staircase). Sometimes you get stuck on the ladder of life, so what you need to do is to kick out the rung beneath you "so that we may climb toward our tomorrow, while leaving yesterday behind."

OK, I've studied cognitive linguistics, so I'm fine with the future-is-up-past-is-down image schema, but I don't spend a lot of time climbing ladders, so I'm having a hard time visualising the rest. Is the rung beneath me the one I'm standing on or the one below that? And in either case, what good would kicking it out do me? And how would the rungs be preventing me from climbing unless they are coated in superglue?

The author goes on to say "Destinations are determined by our daily decisions, as is our grasp and the speed of our climb." Wait a minute. This is a ladder, the rungs of which are made up of habits and the like. So how can we choose the destination of this ladder, except perhaps by running down and propping it up against a different wall? We are then told that "Each of us finds ourselves at some point stuck between the rungs, pinned at an impasse." I don't see how you can get stuck between the rungs of a ladder unless you have really, really big feet.

"We all are capable of reverse engineering our own bad behavior, but we cannot unlock the door without looking for the key." So now we are off the ladder and reverse engineering a door? And then, as if the metaphors weren't mixed enough, the author breaks the news that he has "sailed the seas to full time writer." Actually, this makes me feel rather bad about my snide comments (though not so bad as to refrain from clicking the "Post" button). The man has a dream, and he's so committed to following it that he's just closed the pre-school business he set up with his wife. I'm torn between hoping he succeeds (because I'm actually a nice person who likes to see people succeed) and wanting his blog to die of bit-rot.

Comments

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

That's great! I've been working on a project in which we identify the systems of metaphors used by people who are trying to quit tobacco. One of the metaphors we "fed" them as part of the orginal tobacco cessation intervention was a ladder in which the person's degree of action corresponds to how high they're standing on the ladder (just barely thinking about it = low rung, etc.). To illustrate this, we spent some time going through Microsoft Office's clip-art, trying to find a suitable ladder, but none of their ladders actually went from one state of being to the next; most of them left the climber in some random lofty place but still on the ladder. What's wrong with propping a ladder on a wall between a bad place and a good place, I want to know.

[solri.livejournal.com]

The problem is that mainly people stand on ladders to do things like paint walls. The people who go up a ladder to get where they want are called "burglars".

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I'll pass that along to my colleagues.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I laughed out loud!