Sunday 15 December 2013

The Right Way Up


Here’s a pyramid.
 

 

 
The base is when you were born, the apex is when you’ll die.  You have no choice but to climb the pyramid, through inexorable time.
The substance of the pyramid is your potential – what remains for you to achieve?  As you climb, your potential will inevitably diminish; that’s the way pyramids work.
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So think outside the pyramid.  The higher you climb, the more you see.  And maybe by breaking off chunks of rock and throwing them, you’ll be able to change what you see.  (Sometimes they will bounce off other pyramids and come back.)
Of course, the worth of the climb will depend on how you do it.  You can go up the craggy, rough-clad outside, which will be hard but will increase your field of vision and focus your choice of chunks to throw; or you can crawl up the narrow inside tunnels, which may be easier but you won’t see so much, except through the occasional passageway that might lead to the outside.  Difficult to aim accurately through those though.
If you’ve chosen the outside path you can probably duck round a corner to a different route up (pyramids have four facets).  And of course there are many forks and turns in those tunnels too. 

Like the Pyramids of Giza, this metaphor is starting to crumble, so I’ll stop.  For now.

7 comments:

  1. I'm having to think about this. What I love about metaphors is that you can sometimes turn them upside down.

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  2. The answer is a Private Finance Initiative to fund a smoothly spiralling pathway, rising around the flanks of the pyramid. It is called a mortal coil. The return on the investment is the view from the top, of the undiscovered country and pronounce "I'm king of the castle", prior to shuffling off.

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  3. Pyramids are excellent metaphors. Pyramid selling has been rightfully legislated against because the pyramid expands exponentially downwards and the power of individual levels evaporates as the returns flowed upwards.
    The classic 20th Century pyramid hierarchy of management has also fallen into disrepute and replaced by a wide-flat but more autocratic structure like Apple or Microsoft.
    Quantitive easing is now building up a pyramid of consumer driven property-based spending where the real producers are being squashed into the top of the pyramid by upward pressure of non-producers causing potential for an explosion and return to rural poverty.
    If we could build a large enough pyramid we could entomb all the accountancy and consultancy firms in a huge Tutankhamen style enclosure.

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  4. I liked the ones that had mint creme inside, pyramints?

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  5. Ooh, it's a bit angular. Can I have a cone, please?

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  6. Thank you for all your beneficial advice. So, all I need to do is:

    1. Raise some money and use it to reshape human nature.
    2. Reshape everyone's lives into cones filled with mint crème.
    3. Become a Pharoah.
    4. Think about it.

    Not necessarily in that order.

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