The Box holds life’s values, choices, and experiences, its perimeter strung with lights to navigate what a friend calls “all the rest of it.”
Decisions and life experiences sort and police what goes in The Box and what does not. Life would be clean, neat, and orderly if everything snuggled perfectly into an assigned place, but reality scoffs at the thought. Life is not a checklist to be completed. It is a maze of left turns, right turns, wrong turns, dented fenders, and backup lights. Navigating life is complicated and messy.
Everyone has a Box, a catch-all receptacle of random accumulations piled upon each without order or inventory in a mismatched hodgepodge that must be rummaged. Inside are evolving values, random experiences and rarities, dreams fulfilled and abandoned, knickknacks from micro-moments never to be forgotten, and emotional spikes of bliss and sorrow. Sprinkled in are unfulfilled desires, wistful regrets, do-over wishes, and second chance laments for things we should have fixed or done differently but regrettably never did.
Not everything in life fits inside The Box. Love, for example, rarely does because true love is way bigger than The Box. True love soars, flutters, and drifts in fickle wind, dipping occasionally to thumb its nose at The Box below. Love is arrogant that way. Inconvenient and arrogant, thank God for its existence. The same holds true for opportunities. Many in life arrive unannounced. Unexpected newness or change disruption might rattle inside the box, but sometimes the greatest breaks coming from the road less traveled.
Whether it’s love or other external forces, the creation of responsorial or reflexive stimuli shape what we consider gently placing or forcefully throwing into The Box. Whether or not something earns its way into The Box depends on two things:
- The impact of the thoughts and feelings the event generates. What we think drives how we feel, but what we feel drives what we do. If we are open-minded, we evaluate things openly. If a past negative experience turns us permanently close-minded, we might lose a chance to learn, grow, and advance.
- How wide openings are, relative to the spaghetti strainer or coffee filter our brains utilize, en route to deciding what to save or discard. People whose lives process life experiences through tiny imperceptible holes like a coffee filler capture and keep more than those with larger holes like a strainer.
Filtering thoughts, expectations, and experiential surprises and calamities through the brain’s strainer or sieve determines what is culled to add to The Box and what we discard. For example, people who hold grudges filter through finer, tighter strainers than those who do not. The same holds true for those vulnerable to being judged. The habit of collecting and hoarding with a reluctance to ignore is why some go through life filling far larger boxes than others; and why those larger boxes are often crammed full rather than half-empty.
Own your box, keep it orderly, and judiciously challenge what you insist belongs. Just because some person or thing butts in and demands consideration does not mean that he, she, or it has the right to be there. And just because something is already in The Box does means it must remain. Rotate The Box’s inventory, especially as life matures us by age or influence.
Inside the box will be your core values and beliefs. Outside The Box, things will orbit or meteor by. Do not fear the orbiting UFO or meteor of opportunity. The unexpected helps make life worth living.