To Wit: An E-zine On How To Be a Wit
06/14/2008

This is an E-zine from Thomas Christopher on how to be witty.

WITTY SELF-EXPRESSION PRODUCTS

I'm offering T-shirts and other self-expression products designed using the techniques discussed here. I've set up an online "store" at wittyselfexpression.com. I expect to use many of the designs as examples in this e-zine.

Picking Up The Pieces

I had a woman friend once who wrote me a letter saying that she had just gotten a divorce and had lost custody of her son. She said "I'm picking up the pieces of my life. Sadly I don't want most of them."

"Picking up the pieces of your life" is an apt metaphor. Our lives have many pieces. There's a piece for every group we're in. There's a piece for every relationship. There are pieces for occupation and family. There are pieces for our interests and our skills.

Alas, however apt it may be, "picking up the pieces" is a stale metaphor. It can be refreshed by asking, "What kind of pieces?"

By "picking up the pieces," we could be thinking of life as a broken pot, but a broken pot may be so damaged that all the pieces have to be thrown away. We wouldn't want that meaning for our lives. And if the pieces can be glued together, the resulting pot will never be as good as the original. Broken lives often come out better. We can lose one job and find a better one. We can break up with one person and find someone who is much more suitable. A broken pot is not a good metaphor.

What about a jigsaw puzzle? There is only one way to put a jigsaw puzzle together and then it comes out exactly the same. But when this woman was putting her life back together, there were pieces missing. Again the result of picking up the pieces of a jig saw puzzle will never be better than the one solution, but the eventual result of a dramatic breakup of our lives sometimes is better. A jigsaw puzzle is not a great metaphor.

What about children's building blocks? They can fall over and be put back together in a new form. But the building blocks are all identical. The parts of our lives are not interchangeable. We cannot replace a job with an expensive hobby. And sometimes, as at puberty, we receive a new piece of our identity which cannot just be stacked on top of what we've built, but must be placed near the center. Blocks are not a perfect metaphor either.

What about a kit? A kit has different kinds of pieces to assemble. If we explore a kit as a metaphor for life we might come up with this:

Life is a kit, but

• it only comes with a sketch of what it should look like that is labeled "not to scale,"
• it comes without assembly instructions,
• other people offer their instructions, but their instructions are all different, and their instructions don't seem to include all our pieces,
• every so often we receive a new piece, and to fit it in, we have to take apart what we have already built,
• sometimes pieces break, and we have to rebuild without them.

By asking "what kind of?" we can freshen up stale metaphors and in the process gain new insights.

Visit our web site at www.toolsofwit.com
To unsubscribe, send an e-mail request to tc-a@toolsofwit.com with the subject line: Unsubscribe.