ABSTRACT
“I survived the wedding!” “When I grow up.” “Let's go for it.” The ideas of surviving or lasting, growth or journey, and movement in these quotes are metaphors relating to goals. So, too, are metaphors such as “When my ship comes in,” “Let's shoot for that date,” and “My life's mission,” which involve notions of vessel and arrival, choosing targets and triggering actions, and a deep sense of purpose. In fact, so fundamental are metaphors to the expression of goals that it is very hard to describe the metaphoric content of these ideas without using still other metaphors. What is a goal after all, if not a metaphor? A goal is a proxy, a representation of one thing such as reaching a finish line, scoring, graduating, finding inner peace, and achieving other physical and emotional states. Consider football, for instance, which involves literal goal lines to be crossed or defended. The process of literally achieving a goal in this business called a game involves clutch first downs, big plays, time out, dead ball fouls, beating another player, and a Hail Mary. It may also involve being on cloud nine and spiking. At the same time, there are other metaphoric statements about what the defending team does to prevent a goal from being achieved. Viewed from the larger systems perspective of an action on a playing field by two teams and officials, we see conflicting purposes and objectives being experienced all at once and necessarily described with the use of metaphor. This shouldn't be surprising since it is estimated that people use an average of 5.7 metaphors per minute of speech (Gibbs 1994). The topic of conflicting goals will be addressed later in this chapter.
