A Cold Shower is the Perfect Metaphor for Life

Have you ever had to take a cold shower? I don’t mean a Southern California cold shower, I mean a Colorado Rockies in January cold shower. Really cold. Perhaps the water heater was not working. So there you were, considering the merits of natural human body odor.

If you are like most people who have found themselves facing down this possibility, then you spent a fair amount of time talking yourself into crossing the threshold after you turned on the water.

And once in, you probably made a lot of funny, high-pitched noises — and put together some new vocabulary combinations as your body tightened and you frantically got as clean as you could. This is all quite normal.

What is crucial to appreciate about this experience is that no amount of waiting outside the shower or tensing and squealing inside it is ever going to change the water temperature. That shower is going to be cold no matter what you do.

That is precisely why it is such a great metaphor for life. Almost all of the tensing, yelling, and arm waving we do is for nothing.

We could use less energy stepping into the shower, breathing gently, and allowing our body to relax. Either way — tense or calm — the water is cold.

Many of my clients take cold showers regularly for this reason. Stepping into a challenging or unpleasant situation with an open body posture and gentle breathing is a powerful practice for life.

Setback, illness, disagreements, injury, loss — none of these are made better by contraction and frenzy. If you want to see a beautiful example of this, watch an experienced first responder arrive on a scene. Slow, calm, methodical.

You have the ability to take a cold shower or live your life with a lot of resistance and flailing about. You also have the ability to take that same shower or live that same life breathing gently and moving purposefully.