Metaphor your troubles?

A simile is like an analogy, metaphorically speaking.

Getting your message across isn’t always easy. Information and learning can often be dense, comprehensive, or dependant on a lot of supporting information for context. A literal translation often isn’t enough to ensure proper understanding.

Striking a balance between being thorough and digestible is where the challenge is. This balance is on a knife’s edge, which makes it incredibly difficult to read.

But why stop at simple translation? Taking potentially rigid and stolid concepts and creating a unique connection with seemingly unrelated ideas can be eye opening and reveal new avenues to explore and understand information. In the words of Frank Zappa — “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.” A good metaphor, simile or analogy is like a ripcord.

Sometimes the idea is too large or complex to understand casually. In some cases, it’s difficult to truly understand at all in isolation. Let’s take, for example, the age of the universe. Don’t worry, this won’t take long.

Just shy of 14 billion years old is the currently established age of the universe. 14 billion is a number that seems to make sense at face value. It’s just very very large. However, each of us have a barometer for time — our lifetime up to this point. Put in that context, 14 billion years is too large to make sense. It exceeds all combined human history by many factors, receding into a vast ocean of unknowable time.

Carl Sagan made sense of this in the 1970’s in his book The Dragons of Eden, and later in the television series Cosmos by comparing the history of the universe to a calendar year, which he dubbed the Cosmic Calendar. In 2014, Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson revised the calendar against the age of the universe calculated more accurately in the 40 years since the Cosmic Calendar’s initial conception.

There have been at least a few milestones in the universe since its creation, and most of them had nothing to do with humanity. Here are some notables on the Cosmic Calendar:

The first second of January 1st — the big bang bangs

Mid-January — stars and small galaxies begin to coalesce

March — the Milky Way Galaxy forms

August — the Sun forms

September — basic life appears on Earth

Early morning, December 30th — dinosaur extinction event

11pm, December 31st — Humans evolved

1 second before midnight — science is used to unlock the laws of nature

Midnight December 31st — Right now

Using this analogy, we can establish that all of human history occurred in the last hour of the last day of the Cosmic Calendar. It’s abstract, granted, but it’s also eye opening, humbling and offers an utterly unique way of understanding this otherwise nonsensical piece of information.

So think about using metaphors, similes or analogies to get your information or message out to a greater audience more effectively!