The egocentric person in reality is a person who does not love himself, and so he is greedy.*
(Erich Fromm)

Collagers tell themselves a better story with what they have.

It’s the glass half-full or half-empty thing. The stories we tell ourselves influence us greatly one way or another, this way or that.

Anne Pirrie explores collage rather than college as an educational experience:

‘Collage provides a useful metaphor for some of the qualities that are crucial to both good education and good thinking: rapid tearing, shredding, unusual juxtapositions, the subversion of the temporal order of things, a quickness and nimbleness of thought.’**

To become skilled at taking what we have and putting it together in a different way promises a better story, too. Our lives don’t only have to be lived this way, they can also be lived out this way, or this way, or even this way – the collager has adjacent possibilities.

It also feels that the collager has an understanding of playfulness, remembering Johan Huizinga’s work on play when he asserts:

‘genuine play is one of the main bases of civilisation,’^

then going on to suggest:

‘Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath.’^

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)
(**From Anne Pirrie’s Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship.)
(^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)