Resources - Metaphors
When I was younger I lived in a large Victorian terraced house set over 4 stories. The ground floor was the heart of our home. We cooked, ate and relaxed together there. Higher up were the bedrooms where each of us had freedom to express our taste in interior design and love of music.
My family was made up of 6 women and two men it was a vibrant and energetic place and there was always lots of discussion going on, and we were always being challenged or challenging the others about our thoughts and ideas in some way. (Chuckle)
Now, there was one place in that large noisy house that I loved to go and that was right down at the bottom of our house in our cellar. I would walk from our bright kitchen down a steep set of wooden stairs into the cellar.
The cellar was large and dark and was filled with hidden treasures from times past. Behind the stairs it was jam packed with old wood picked up from places along the way. There was a large coal shed in the cellar which hadn’t been used in a long time. Along one long wall was an enormous old fashioned dresser, filled to the brim with tools from the smallest nail to the biggest saws.
We had a vast kit of tools in our house; some had been inherited from previous generations, others that we had purchased ourselves. Now over time my father allowed us to work with him and he would teach us how to use the tools, at first we were a little clumsy but as we practiced over and over and over again we found that we got better and better and there came a time when we knew that we were all able to use all the tools effectively and safely, knowing that we would use some tools more than others. So we were not only able to help mend broken things, but we were now able to create new and wonderful things too with all the knowledge that had been given to us.
So when eventually we left home and started up our own places. My parents gave each of us a beautiful hand crafted wooden tool box with our names engraved on the front of them. Each box contained all the essential tools that we would need, so in our new places, it became fun to use our new tools. Knowing how to use those tools we could use them with such confidence and ease.