How’s that for a clickbait title?
I’ve written about The Beatles and the five classic conflict response styles. And in our trainings, we correlate these styles to various animals. But you can never have too many belabored metaphors, so let’s try it out with cutlery.
The fork is the competitor of your kitchen drawer. With its spiky tines, it assertively digs into whatever it darn well pleases. Villagers tormented Frankenstein’s monster with pitchforks. Krakens and sea serpents regularly found themselves on the business of Neptune’s trident.
The spoon is our flatware accommodator. It scoops up whatever liquid or semi-viscous substance that’s in its path. It goes with the flow. What is an oar, if not a big-ass spoon?
Chopsticks, in my troglodyte hands, are the avoider. While billions use them with grace and Mr. Miyagi catches flies with them, in my paws chopsticks avoid anything smaller than an ice-cube sized hunk of moo goo gai pan.
The knife, though stabby and weaponizable, is our compromiser: it divides things up, slicing the pie so everyone gets a taste.
Our collaborator? The spork. An elegant and creative tool that is more than the sum of its parts, allowing you to do whatever you need to do with your food…scoop, slice, poke, you name it. The spork has yet to earn its rightful place in the flatware pantheon — not unlike how mediation is not yet the movement it deserve to be.
May the spork be with you.
Update: I just heard that KFC discontinued sporks. Not cool.
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