Gestalt Theory

Life experience makes us all wise in our own ways.  We all have different interests and preferences.  Our own experiences and opinions shape our worlds.  That makes the world a very interesting place.  I’d like to share a concept from the creative process that changed my understanding of life experiences.  It has helped me see that we all learn differently, in our own ways and on our own timeline.  It’s called the Gestalt Theory.  There are many principles of Gestalt design, but for my purposes, I’d like to think about it the way an old roommate of mine explained it to me for the first time.  

Imagine you are a talented painter working on a masterpiece.  It’s a very large canvas, so you can’t paint everything in the scene all at once.  In your mind you have an overall vision, but you’re not exactly sure how it will all come together.  Maybe you’ve got some rough sketches or plans.  When it’s time to start your canvas, you work bit by bit, color by color, meticulously.  These little blobs start growing all over the canvas, all separate from each other.  As you dive deeper and deeper into creating this canvas, the blobs grow closer and closer then one connects with another and you have a bigger piece of the puzzle.  Then those two connect with another, and another and this keeps occurring until you finally can make sense of the scene a bit more.  You can see the head meeting the body, the grassland touching the sky, the mountains meeting the plains.  It takes incredible vision on the part of the artist to see the big picture before any of the blobs are touching and before making sense of the larger picture.  It takes perseverance.  It takes a degree of risk.  It takes seeing a few steps ahead, then putting your head down to focus on what you can do in that moment.  

This is a metaphor I like for life.  I’m Gestalting myself all the time.  One blob connects to another and I can finally glimpse a little further ahead and make sense of something I’ve been working towards.  I’m not sure how big the canvas is, so this could go on forever.  I hope it does.  Life is a giant game of ‘Connect the Dots.’  Intuition helps guide us towards which blobs to work on when.  Dedication to honing those areas of our lives helps connect more dots and then shows us that the overall picture is larger than we thought before that moment.  The overall canvas is somewhere near the intersection of your mind and spirit colliding to create a beautiful masterpiece.  Keep working on it!  It’ll get more and more beautiful as you can see more of the canvas.

Thanks Sam for introducing me to this concept!  It’s been a great motivator and shows up in my journaling often to keep me charging forward. 🐾