I Am a Work of Art and a Work in Progress All on the Same
Equally long equally you're alive, your life is a work in progress (unfinished). Just is it merely work or is it a work of art? And what deviation does it make?
The idea of living ane'south life as a work in progress is not original. Simply several decades ago, when I was struck afresh by the rich possibilities of artistic metaphor, I not only looked at my own life in this context, I too queried some friends.
No one had problem responding, and I was surprised by every 1 of their answers. A former insurance industry executive said his life would be a multi-media operation slice. A writer described her life every bit a sculpture, while a musician referred to his equally a "junk" sculpture. A computer programmer declared his life was a symphony. Here are a scattering of detailed descriptions:
Kathy:
I come across myself as a mobile spinning out of command.
I'm not quite put together in a manner that moves with the ebb and menses of gentle breezes yet.
I'm unbalanced and jerked around right now.
I or ii pieces of something substantial demand to exist added so I can untangle myself when the forces of nature, or man hand, crusade me to spin temporarily out of command.
(This temporary spinning does non inflict permanent harm. It just causes me not to be my usual self.)
Kelly:
The piece of work of art in progress: me covered in layer upon layer of steel, physical, wood, glass, gunpowder, feathers, year after yr and lots of work…perchance some layers come up off to expose this work of art…me.
Kinda like a big dodder of marble, taking off what is not me and getting to the real David…um, no…Kelly.
Warning: completed works of art are non on our airplane anymore.
Lee:
A sand castle, co-structured by a small child.
Nosotros came from the sea, I will go dorsum to the sea…
Imperfect, made from tiny pieces and subject to the whims of nature…
Able to be alpine and strong, ridged yet soft…
Able to exist shaped by the people and the globe around me…
Formed by moisture sand dripping from a child'south manus or sculptured by forms and adept hands.
Linda:
I think of MY LIFE as an oil painting. Starting with a clean canvas I splash some paint on, but to come across what information technology will look like.
Later experimenting, I decide that it would exist better to Have a Plan.
I depict out in pen what I want to paint. I add together some color.
If I catch the pigment before it dries I can change it or scrape it off entirely.
The retentivity of what has gone before is notwithstanding in that location, simply it is not entrenched in who I am.
When I wait too long and the pigment dries, it becomes a function of the sail.
I depict a new plan.
As I build upward the layers of pigment, calculation depth, my canvas thickens with layers of pigment.
I realize that I do not have to have a plan for everything.
I realize that my painting looks meliorate when I take gone exterior the lines of the plan.
My sheet now has years and years of paint added, paint that has dried, colors that have changed or been scraped off.
I'm really starting to like what I have painted.
Nicole:
Well, it would be a whirlwind in places spinning lots of reds, peppery and out of command, deep yellows, oranges, spinning Fall colors. And and then over where the Bluish starts to outnumber the red you will find other places: neatly categorized and presumably alphabetical piddling Blackness stacks. Each one placed with precision, stacked upward to the ceilings in wavering stature, suggesting that they might fall at any moment in time.
Steve:
My life has always been a motion-picture show, with music rambling in my caput, the stimuli existence "things passing by/me going forward"—motionless.
The Play'southward the Thing…
In one case upon a time, I saw my life as a play. There's an inherent discipline in living life every bit a play in progress that'south unlike from the subject area involved in living life equally a sculpture or a symphony or a painting. Staging, timing, and pacing are crucial. Significantly, in a play the props and scenery are vital—only only to the scenes they vest in. Information technology makes no sense for an actor to become attached to whatsoever particular props.
I was aware of things as background props and of people, including myself, as characters from an early on age. I wrote plays, read plays, hung out with the local drama grouping, and thought up names and descriptions of characters, likewise as elaborate decorating schemes, to entertain myself.
At some point I noticed what I was doing and decided information technology was an odd way to think near myself and the world. Whereas other people seemed to brand choices almost instinctively, I could consider a range of alternatives: a final choice would depend on the requirements of the scene or the plot line. Choosing otherwise seemed arbitrary. In spite of considering my view of life somewhat idiosyncratic, I connected to operate within that framework. When a major plot twist offered the opportunity for me to reinvent myself, I had no difficulty doing then. It was but a play, afterward all.
Although I probably appreciate the value in that point of view now more than than I did then, I wouldn't use the same metaphor to describe my current life. It frequently feels more similar a surrealistic jigsaw puzzle: challenging, colorful, then much to look at, yet not put together (nonetheless creating), and not at all what you'd expect.
In that location's value in experimenting with styles and forms, imagining and reimagining our lives through different lenses and perspectives.
So, if your life were a work of art in progress, what metaphor would you choose to depict it? What shape would it have? What colors and/or sounds would information technology have? What process or media would be involved in its creation? What emotions would information technology evoke?
Would it be a painting, a sculpture, a black and white photograph montage? A novel, a short story, a play, a verse form, an essay? Would it be a song-bike, a symphony, an opera, a collage, a Rodgers and Hart musical, a movie? Or…something else altogether.
A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using noesis of this to call up about that. —Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life
A focus on creating yourself is the opposite of a focus on fixing yourself: the motility and the action are forward rather than backward. Thinking about your life as a work of art in progress tin shift your view of what you're doing in life—and of what you're capable of doing. Creating art is compelling and juicy and expansive. Information technology is an ongoing process of bringing something—in this case yous—into being.
Information technology is that dimension [our imagination of ourselves] whereby we are not merely living our lives—passively, as it were—but are actively giving them shape: ceaselessly interpreting and inventing ourselves afresh. It is that dimension whereby nosotros do not receive a life equally much as compose a life—every bit we might etch a story. As nosotros appreciate the extent of this dimension, it becomes impossible to see how whatever attribute of our lives can escape our self-creative touch. —William Lowell Randall, The Stories Nosotros Are
Source: https://farthertogo.com/you-a-work-of-art-in-progress/
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