Life Is a Metaphor: The Definitive Book of Self-Help

by Neil Katz

Overview

Life Is a Metaphor is an experiential, light-hearted look at improving the quality of life by examining thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Join in this journey from the Starting Point to the Journey Without and finally the Journey Within.

Learn how to look at life in a new and exciting way that can open up new horizons for self-discovery.

Enjoy thinking positively, experience emotions that feel good, and practise behaviours that are productive and proactive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452574820
Publisher:	Balboa Press
Publication date:	07/03/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	1 MB

Read an Excerpt

LIFE IS A METAPHOR

The Definitive Book of Self-Help

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By NEIL KATZ

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2013 Neil Katz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-7481-3

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CHAPTER 1

PART 1

* * *

THE STARTING POINT

THE PRIMAL KVETCH

THE DARKNESS

L'INFERNO

CAPTIVITY

The Starting Point of my journey was in a small bungalow in a banal, middle-class Toronto suburb a zillion years ago. I was sitting in the middle of the living room floor surrounded by toys, books, and a TV (a focal point in my life). It was a boring Sunday afternoon. My mother was yelling at me from the kitchen to find something constructive to do like clean my room. My father was sitting next to me asleep in the chair that faced the television. My older sister, all of nine years old, was yakking incessantly on the phone to her friends.

Suddenly a wave of anxiety overcame me. I tossed my teddy bear aside, rose to my feet, and with outstretched arms, I cried out in desperation, "Is this all there is?!" I knew immediately something had to be done. I had my future to consider. I was not about to allow something as trivial as the meaning of life to eat away at me until I was nothing more than a shell of a man before my fifth birthday!

So, at the tender age of four, I began a review of my Starting Point, the place I was at, the events and circumstances, and the associated thoughts, feelings and behaviours that made me the miserable little wretch I was. This review lasted fifty years. I think I now finally know my Starting Point, beginning with a chronology of circumstance.

I made a grand entrance into this world—I stopped the Santa Claus parade. My father was at work so my aunt and uncle sped along the streets of Toronto to get my mother to the hospital, located along the parade route on University Avenue. My uncle screamed at my mother, "Cross your legs!" for fear that my birth would mess up his new 1954 Buick. They got the police to stop the floats to let them pass through to the hospital. To the disappointment of the angry mob of spectators on that frosty November afternoon, I was born.

I was a scrawny, wiry, sickly child who measured his milestones in life by illness, injury, and dire circumstances. This made me feel important, loved, and happy.

I had the chicken pox at one month old, scoliosis diagnosed at one year, and a tonsillectomy at age four. At thirteen, I had corrective eye surgery. I also suffered with various respiratory illnesses including asthma, pneumonia, and pleurisy. Continuing into adulthood, I developed myriad other illnesses and debilitating diseases.

I was delighted.

My parents were doting, and I always felt loved, even though my father, forty-one years older than I, worked twelve hours a day and was always too tired to play ball with me, and was too old-fashioned to have a meaningful conversation with me because "only sissies talk about their feelings". My mother was a smart, funny and loving woman who also happened to be manic-depressive (as bipolar was known in those days). She was in hospitals for treatment more than she was at home. From the age of eight, I would take care of her at home while she lay in bed in agony with severe headaches, as I stole glances out the window at my neighbourhood friends outside playing. Or else I was visiting her in hospitals with barred windows and naked light bulbs. On many occasions, she was reeling from electro-convulsive shock treatments or was stupefied into submission by the smorgasbord of tranquilizers and anti-depressants prescribed to her.

I was elated.

My only sibling was a typical older sister whom I love very much ... back then, however, not so much. When she wasn't on the phone with her friends, she was threatening to tell my parents that I was watching TV instead of studying or she was blackmailing me if I didn't do her favours. Much of the time, she was begging me for reassurance that my mother's illness was only mental and not physical. Once I confirmed this, she was off with her friends again, leaving me to my own devices and holding the bag.

I was overjoyed.

School was a struggle for me. Just because I knew my times tables and could spell polysyllabic words in grade two, I was accelerated in grades three, four, and five, completing them in two years. This left me bewildered and socially inept. At ten years old in grade seven, I was beaten up by some schoolmates and teased mercilessly by others, some of whom were three or four years older than I was.

I was ecstatic.

I married my sweetheart after a two-year teenage courtship. We declared our love and discussed our dreams for the future. Now, decades later with four grown children and a grandchild, we are still very much married. Mostly she ignores me, nags me, or tells me all the things I do which are wrong.

I am enthralled.

I had secured employment in the field of Social Services for the City which I held for thirty-three years until my retirement. I am now at home with my wife, complaining about my health, worrying for my future, and constantly looking around for something to keep me busy. My wife is not pleased.

But I am enraptured.

Our four beautiful kids are the lights of my life. My wife and I cared for them through the ups and downs of family life and I worry about them every minute of every day, even now that they are adults. My son was hit by a car when he was fourteen and sustained a severe head injury. I have three daughters, one who overcame OCD, anorexia, and anxiety, one who was a rebel in her teens, and one who fought a battle with depression and trychotillomania (hair pulling) and won. All of my children insisted on learning about life the hard way despite my attempts at teaching them and helping them. But this paragraph doesn't belong here. My success stories are found in Part III.

These were some of the circumstances of my life to date. I am sharing them to give context to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that I developed over the years with which you, lucky reader, are now to become acquainted.

THOUGHTS

In order to examine thoughts, I believed it was necessary to understand two basic elements:

1) What is a thought?

2) Where does a thought come from?

So I started simply with a dictionary definition:

Thought (n): the act of thinking; an idea. Guess what I found when I looked up the definition of 'idea'? A thought. Naturally! So my thought on thoughts was that this is bullshit.

I explored some more and got much more than I bargained for, and each answer elicited more questions, leading me into the fields of physical science, neuropsychology, linguistics, spirituality, and philosophy. Here is some of what I found about thought:

• An organization of electro-chemical impulses in the brain. Do I have to become a card-carrying member of this organization?

• An internal response to internal or external stimuli. What could the internal stimuli that trigger imagination or creativity possibly be? A stomach cramp?

• A mathematical computation which occurs above the level of consciousness. What if you're lousy at math?

• Depends on the type of thought: reflective, reactive/responsive, connective, deductive, intuitive, idle, directed, psychic, interpretive, perceptive, etc. Huh?

• There is no such thing as individual thought ... We all tap into a pool of infinite cosmic thought. Where did this pool of cosmic thought come from and how do we tap into it? Does this mean you know what I'm thinking (God forbid!)?

• We do not actively think; thoughts pass through us and we simply become aware of them. So now I'm a ghost?

All of this research was fascinating but it was taking me in directions I did not want to go, at least for the purpose of this book. And I still did not understand what a thought was or where it came from. Besides, I think all this thinking about thoughts was giving me a headache.

In an effort to stay focused, I decided that, as a review of my starting point, I was not going to worry so much about what thought is or where it comes from but would, instead, focus on the kinds of thoughts one has and their impact on living and well-being. More specifically, what were my thoughts and how did they shape my life?

Here are some of them. This is by no means a complete list but I believe they do show where I was coming from ...

WHO AM I?

(What I think about myself)

* * *

"I just retired from a successful thirty-three-year career in Social Services. Not bad, considering I'm anti-social!"

* * *

I am stupid. I am fat. I am ugly. I am lazy. I am incapable. I am unlikable. I am inadequate. I am sick. I am boring. I am worthless.

And so it goes, on and on.

Labels.

My mother used to sew labels on my summer camp clothes that read "ROTTEN LAZY BRAT" for easy identification.

Adjectives.

Adjectives are the prettiest part of any language and open up a whole world of imagination. Strange that, like thorns on a rose, they can have a painful aspect to them as well. Adjectives are lethal weapons. They provoke arguments. They initiate wars. They are instrumental in battles. More significantly, adjectives can be the cause, effect, and justification for suicide.

Labels are adjectives.

Labels describe who you are. I know who I am. I am a stupid, fat, incapable, unlikable, inadequate, sickly, worthless, lazy bore.

It says so right here on the back of my shirt collar.

IDENTITY CRISIS

(Seeking my identity)

* * *

"A young man walked into a dermatologist's office and said, 'Can you help me? I think I'm a moth.' The dermatologist said, 'You don't need a dermatologist. You need a psychiatrist.' 'Yes, I know,' said the man. The dermatologist asked, 'So then why did you come in here?' The man replied, 'The light was on.'"

* * *

At the risk of sounding like an amnesiac, I have often asked myself, "Who am I?" I never allowed myself the chance to get to know me and consequently was never able to answer the "Who am I?" question to my satisfaction. Oh, deep down I indulged in an assortment of fantasies like we all do (don't we?), of who I am.

• What I do (or did), my profession: Now retired, I was a Social Services supervisor for the City

• What I would like to do or be: I would like to be a writer, I would like to be smart, I would like to be famous

• What my relationships are: I am a father, a husband, a son, a brother, a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, an employee, a student, etc.

• What I have accomplished:???

• How I would like to see myself: I would like to see myself as a good person, useful, important, kind, virtuous, honest, honourable, sincere, blah, blah, blah ...

But those fantasies always maintained a faded, translucent quality that never quite took form. Ideas were never fully developed, goals were never clearly defined. And so I remained in this hazy state of limbo for much of my life.

Could a reality check help me figure out who I am? Well, I am one of several billion people on this planet; I am a microspeck in the cosmos; I am a figment of someone else's imagination (dumb son-of-a-bitch! That someone else is either a masochist or has the world's worst imagination!).

Heavy sigh.

I never learned how to define myself and consequently never really knew who I was.

THE PHYSICAL ME

(Dealing with who I am physically)

* * *

"I was trying to write a joke about penis size but every time I come up short."

* * *

I do not like my body. I think it is rather grotesque. I am unequivocally the baldest, fattest, ugliest man in the whole wide world, even when I was a kid (except I had hair on my head; except I was skinny; except I wasn't a man when I was a kid). I have the crookedest face, the yellowiest teeth, the smallest endowment, and the bumpiest cranium. I concede that I am a superlative specimen of Homo Sapiens. Not all my attributes are God-given; some of my hideous corpus is self-made: chewed-at fingers, portly paunch, stooped posture and the like (nothing less than an ostentatious demonstration of my passive-aggressive psyche). But everything must be put in perspective, mustn't it? The body is only a host, after all. My body is not the real me; it contains the real me. When I secrete body fluids I am not making a statement. My body is my body and has a life of its own (doesn't it?).

I particularly do not like my body when it misbehaves and causes pain. I have a very low pain threshold. Often, when in pain, I make a bargain with God (usually in a whining, pleading voice), "Please, God, make the pain go away and I promise to be a good husband, father, son (depending on with whom I have argued most recently). The rule is usually one promise per favour. I will never offer to be a good husband and a good son in exchange for help with just one pain or just one unpleasant occurrence. By the time I recover or by the time the bad experience has disappeared I have already broken my promise. Hastily I tell myself that I didn't really make a promise because perhaps there is no God, or that the promise was actually invalid because there is a good scientific or psychological explanation. Hence no more pain and a clear conscience. But I would rather not have had the pain in the first place, if the truth be known. Physical discomfort definitely reduces emotional pain to mere self-indulgence.

To wit I raise my Maalox cocktail and hurl it at the mirror in honour of the physical me.

WHY BOTHER?

(Finding a sense of purpose)

* * *

"Everyone has a purpose in life. Mine is watching television."

"My mother told me that my sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others."

* * *

One of my favourite pastimes is writing, however, more often than not I am stricken with writer's block. Everything I want to say has already been said one way or another anyway so why bother? "Why bother?" seems to sufficiently answer most of my problem questions. Rhetoric is my life.

There were so many things I wanted to do with my life (on good days) and still do. But we all end up dead anyway, so why bother?

My wife seems relatively content with her life. I hate her. She goes through the motions of filling her day with things that "have to be done". This was my father's notion of an ideal lifestyle. Except he didn't believe my wife was really doing anything that had to be done. My father insisted that she did nothing and what she did do she did wrong. This made him happy. He picked on me more; after all, I was his flesh and blood. I never did the right things at the right times. I would argue with him about this. And he would reply, "Fine, you don't want me to be a father, I won't be a father!" I would try to explain and he would accuse me of being a know-it-all who didn't know much about anything. "His heart! His Heart!" my mother would shout, whipping me into submission. I would always surrender to it all with a sigh: "Why bother?"

My wife can be quiet, remote, and withdrawn. She denies it and accuses me of being sarcastic, moody, and depressed. "What's wrong?" she asks, feigning concern in a most obvious manner. "Nothing," I answer in an extremely sarcastic, moody, and depressed tone of voice. Why bother?

Sometimes, out of frustration, I would pack my books away, or clean out the basement, or rearrange the furniture. Or I would go upstairs, throw myself on the bed, and exclaim in a well-rehearsed, melodramatic voice, "Why bother?"

I've always been searching for meaning in my life, a sense of purpose. At first I wanted to be an architect but my Lego blocks kept tumbling over.

Then, I thought my purpose was to be creative. I tried my hand at carpentry but I found out that I was not very handy. At six years old, I showed my father my handiwork, using the tool set which he bought me for my birthday. "Look at what I did!" I shouted with pride. The blood drained out of his face when he saw that I sawed the legs off our dining room chairs.

Next, I wanted to be an actor, bestowed with fame and riches, so I joined the drama club at school. But when the school bullies caught me at the stage door and beat the living crap (ew!) out of me, I suspected acting was not my purpose.

Well, maybe a singer. With my voice yet unchanged, my mother bragged to all her friends, "He sounds just like Julie Andrews!" As if that wasn't enough, one of my friends told me I was so off-key that everything I sang sounded like I had invented a whole new melody. Singing, therefore, was not in the cards for me.

Perhaps a scholar. Except I spent most of my studying time daydreaming or trying to figure out how to get out of studying and still pass the exam.

Later, I wanted to be a psychologist but I failed Statistics 333 three years in a row.

Raising four kids kept me too busy with life to think about its purpose, even if it was right under my nose.

Being in Social Services gave me a purpose of sorts—like having somewhere to go every day for thirty-three years—and there were fleeting moments when I did feel useful and that I may have made a difference in some small way. I would, however, not know since most of the time I was quagged and mired in paperwork, regulations, and office politics.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from LIFE IS A METAPHOR by NEIL KATZ. Copyright © 2013 Neil Katz. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

DEDICATION....................     xi     

PREFACE: CREDENTIALS....................     xiii     

PREFACE: CREDENTIALS REVISED (THE TRUTH)....................     xv     

THE POINT OF THIS BOOK....................     xxi     

PART 1: THE STARTING POINT....................     1     

THOUGHTS....................     7     

FEELINGS....................     41     

BEHAVIOUR....................     69     

PART I—SUMMARY....................     113     

PART 2: THE JOURNEY WITHOUT....................     117     

THE ROAD TO THE PHYSICAL....................     121     

THE ROAD TO THE INTELLECTUAL....................     135     

THE ROAD TO THE SPIRITUAL....................     163     

PART II—SUMMARY....................     183     

PART 3: THE JOURNEY WITHIN....................     185     

THINKING GOOD THOUGHTS....................     191     

FEELING GOOD FEELINGS....................     243     

BEHAVING WELL....................     283     

CONCLUSION....................     369     

BOOKS AND WEBSITES THAT GAVE MY HEAD A SHAKE....................     373