You’re living your mundane little day, heading over to the grocery store and stopping your cart by the bread aisle. You pick up a pack of freshly baked bagels, with everything sprinkled all over them. Some of the toppings struggle to stay on the surface, spilling like confetti all over the plastic wrap. When you get home, you lay out the bagel on a cutting board and you try your hardest to collect this vast combination of sesame, dreams, poppy seed, desires, garlic, fears and salt. You try to keep it together, you try to stay in control of every spot that you sprinkle the “everything” on, but it all falls off the bagel regardless.
That, there, is the Bagel Analogy.
First seen in the highly acclaimed film, “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” the analogy or theory explores the idea of being able to put all your attention, focus and energy in one place in an effort to have complete control of your life. In the film, the “everything” on a bagel is used as a metaphor for one of the character’s attempts at perfecting her life. It represents everything important to the character — her hopes, dreams, memories, nightmares and even rather random and mundane things like old TV ads she watched or report cards she hid.
The question is, what does your bagel look like? Are you spending every minute trying to make it look as pretty and perfect as you possibly can or is your bagel stripped bare with the toppings spilled everywhere but on the surface? At its core, the Bagel Analogy represents human nature. It’s normal to feel the need to have control of our lives. We feel best when things go exactly as we expect and want; no surprises, no disappointments. The more uncertain something gets, the more you feel the need to control. It’s also normal to feel like you’re out of control. The harsh reality is that you can’t be in charge of everything and you can’t have every grain of salt lay perfectly on the bagel.
The question then begs, how do you let go? How do you let yourself be okay with the fact that some things have spilled?
The answer is at the root of the problem. The issue doesn’t stem from the fact that the world is unpredictable — that’s never going to change. There’s no need to be caught up in trying to keep your life perfect, whether it’s in actuality or in appearance. The issue stems from a lack of trust in yourself. The key to the problem is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is “the belief that we can do what needs to be done no matter what is in front of us.” You can let the toppings fall around the bagel because you trust that the bagel will hold some of what falls onto it.
You can control what ingredients make up the “everything” but you can’t control whether they stay on. Another key to improving this mindset and clearing up headspace by proxy is to focus on the possible rather than the impossible. You also might not enjoy reality but ignoring it will have the opposite effect of what you want as an outcome.
In the end, the Bagel Analogy rounds up to one thing — trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the bagel, trust in the “everything” and trust that it’s going to be good.
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