Self-Initiated Change Of State Is Self-Propelled Motion

Transfers

When you change yourself, you move yourself. This metaphor maps the bodily experience of self-propelled motion — walking, running, swimming, climbing under your own power — onto the abstract experience of voluntarily changing your own state. It is a specific elaboration within the Event Structure metaphor system: where CHANGE IS MOTION maps any change onto movement generally, and ACTION IS MOTION maps purposeful activity onto movement, this metaphor restricts both sides. The change must be self-initiated (not externally caused), and the motion must be self-propelled (not pushed, pulled, or carried by something else). The result is a tight mapping between personal agency and autonomous locomotion.

Key structural parallels:

• Voluntary change as walking or running — “She moved on from that career.” “He’s running away from his problems.” “They’re walking a new path.” When a person decides to change their own state, the metaphor frames it as getting up and going somewhere under their own power. The deliberateness of choosing to walk maps onto the deliberateness of choosing to change.
• The speed of change as the speed of locomotion — “She’s rushing into this decision.” “He’s taking it slowly.” “They’re sprinting toward burnout.” How fast you change maps onto how fast you move. Rushing implies reckless self-transformation; going slowly implies careful, measured change.
• Effort of change as physical exertion — “She’s pushing herself to improve.” “He’s struggling to get past this.” “They climbed out of poverty.” Because self-propelled motion requires muscular effort, self-initiated change inherits that effortfulness. Change is work, and the work is physical — you sweat, strain, and tire.
• Direction of change as direction of motion — “She’s going in a new direction.” “He turned his life around.” “They’re headed for disaster.” The direction the self-mover travels corresponds to the nature of the change. Forward is progress; backward is regression; turning is a change of approach.
• Stasis as refusal to move — “She’s stuck in her ways.” “He won’t budge.” “They’re standing still while the world moves on.” Failing to change when change is warranted is mapped onto refusing to move. The metaphor makes stubbornness feel like physical immobility — a body planted in place.

Limits

• The metaphor requires an autonomous agent — self-propelled motion presupposes a mover with legs, muscles, and the will to use them. But many important changes of state happen to people who are only partially in control. Grief changes a person; aging changes a person; falling in love changes a person. None of these are self-propelled in the way walking is self-propelled, yet the metaphor has no good vocabulary for change that is neither fully voluntary nor fully imposed.
• Self-propulsion implies a single direction — when you walk, you go one way at a time. But self-initiated change is often multivalent: a person who starts therapy may become simultaneously more vulnerable, more assertive, more anxious, and more self-aware. The locomotion model cannot capture this multidirectional quality. It forces change into a single trajectory.
• The effort mapping can moralize change — because self-propelled motion requires exertion, the metaphor implies that all genuine change requires struggle. This makes effortless change (sudden insight, spontaneous recovery, falling into a new identity) seem less real or less earned. The metaphor privileges grit over grace.
• The metaphor obscures systemic factors — if self-initiated change is self-propelled motion, then failure to change is failure to move, which reads as laziness or weakness. But people often cannot change their states because of structural constraints — poverty, discrimination, illness — not because they refuse to walk. The metaphor puts all the explanatory weight on the individual’s locomotion and none on the terrain.
• Backward motion is not the same as regression — the metaphor maps moving backward onto reverting to a previous state. But in many contexts, revisiting a previous state is productive rather than regressive. Returning to a simpler lifestyle, reconnecting with an earlier identity, or recovering a lost practice can be forward-looking even when the spatial metaphor frames them as retreat.

Expressions

• “She moved on from that relationship” — leaving a state as walking away from a location (common English usage)
• “He turned his life around” — reversing a negative trajectory as changing direction of motion (common English usage)
• “They climbed out of debt” — escaping a bad state as ascending under one’s own power (common English usage)
• “She’s going in a new direction” — changing approach as changing course of locomotion (common English usage)
• “He’s running away from his problems” — avoiding self-change as fleeing (common English usage)
• “She pushed herself to improve” — effortful self-change as physical exertion (common English usage)
• “He won’t budge on this” — refusal to change as refusal to move (common English usage)
• “They’re taking baby steps” — incremental self-change as the tentative locomotion of an infant (common English usage)

Origin Story

This metaphor is documented in the Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz 1991) as a specific sub-mapping within the Event Structure metaphor system. It combines two foundational metaphors — CHANGE IS MOTION and ACTION IS SELF-PROPELLED MOTION — and restricts both to the reflexive case: the agent of change and the entity that changes are the same person, just as the self-propelled mover is both the source of force and the thing that moves.

Lakoff and Johnson discuss the Event Structure system extensively in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), where they argue that the location case (states are locations, changes are movements) is grounded in the infant’s experience of moving through space and encountering different conditions. The self-propelled variant adds the crucial element of agency: the infant does not just experience different states as it moves — it learns that it can cause state changes by moving itself. This bodily insight becomes the cognitive template for all voluntary self-transformation.

References

• Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Self-Initiated Change of State Is Self-Propelled Motion”
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Chapter 11 — the Event Structure metaphor system
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980) — structural metaphors and the centrality of motion
• Grady, J.E. Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes (1997) — embodied grounding of motion-to-change mappings