Life As A Jigsaw
A metaphor for understanding self.
How do we see ourselves? A complex question. This could be considered what artwork really is, an attempt to see ourselves through metaphor. In that vein our ‘self’ could be seen much like a jigsaw puzzle. Each part of the whole contributes to the picture that your life becomes.
Base emotions, how do they sit within your body? Where do you feel them? Experiences that become memories, or forgotten memories. What effect does that memory have on you? Parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system reactions to stimulus. Those times we ‘don’t know what came over us’, we ‘saw red’, all part of the lattice of life.
In childhood we don’t have all those pieces yet; our brains are forming and developing those systems, literally growing the tissues that we need to understand and interact with our environments, and learning how to connect with the world through our parents actions. A very early version of the jigsaw might be one piece, or two pieces that don’t seem to fit together. I think everyone who’s been a teenager, or has teenagers, can attest to the feeling of not knowing where those pieces fit, and being able to find a piece that feels uncomfortable — we’re unsure where it fits in the picture, we’re unsure what the picture is even supposed to be, so we cry, and shout, and scream, until we can learn to…
