If you have ever looked for a job, you have probably come across a phrase at the description of the ideal candidate: “to think outside the box”.
It’s almost like a publicity on the go, a perfect human of our times, the most advanced version of a current figure is someone who definitely and undoubtedly thinks outside the box.
Is the box something bad, negative, and not desirable? The underlying promise is that outside this box, life is surely more interesting and unique. The box is not sexy, funny, or diverse. It’s rather common, plain and unsophisticated. Probably the same way are the people living in it?
What the mainstream world is suggesting is that we have to escape this little, unattractive, usual box. This mainstream world does not have any idea how to utilize this box and cannot see it as something of a meaning, other than a hindrance to the space available for great ideas of phenomenal impact.
It sounds like the perfect match to the character of this mainstream world that promotes “escapism” by all means. We do not eat normal food, we take tones of supplements to escape from our fast food nutritional chemicals, we are experts in short vacations where we don’t have time to engage into a philosophical conversation with our places of visit, to escape the up normal rhythms of our daily schedules that exhausted us, we leave alone in tiny studios to escape our dynastic families, we commute in our cars to escape the public transportation crowds, we invest our valuable hours in our social media to escape our self-encounter. We like this lifestyle because obviously is not a box. We sleep at nights holding in our hearts as treasures the belief that a life out of this, out of any box, is the open-sesame-formula of our derailed happiness and our flat creativity. And we dream about a life outside that Box.
A very common yet effective exercise given at dance therapy to groups is to imagine that all the space in the room is unlimited and you are free to dance anywhere and experiment and cover the space as if there were no limits.
Contrary to what we think, it feels uncomfortable and stressful to dance or walk or be somewhere with no boundaries or shape. Our mind-hearts feel more relaxed when we are exploring within a structure instead of everything. The vastness of everything at our disposal overwhelms our system. We need a framework to allow our creativity to take flesh and blood and to breathe. Without it, we are getting seriously lost and we lose all our possibility to work on anything.
Thinking outside the box is a great way of putting pressure in yourself for something that is not within your nature. Our nature is a human nature, and to understand our human capacities and the depth of our creativity, we need to stay with our selves, in our creativity.
When you look at things, they self-reveal their truth to you. It is not a hide and seek sequence, it is a question and answer one.
And later on it is not about questioning or interpretations. It is just about sitting in your heart with it.
Whereas, once you are outside the box, you will create another box, probably bigger to hold the small box that you thought you left. You are carrying it in you.
And if you decide to leave this box, too, you will follow the sequence and you will end up boxed in a boxed box.
The best examples of human capacity, creativity and intelligence derived from people that spent enormous time in their respective boxes, composing world class acuteness. If you are interested in a life that contributes to other lives, start considering the living wisdom of your own box.