Be the Box

An Essay by Stephen Geez
www.StephenGeez.com

Art by Dizzy

DizzyArt

Think outside the box.

Yeah, I know, it’s rather cliché, the old shift-your-paradigm adage.  This sage advice is delivered more often than not by someone too comfortable inside the box to do his own outside thinking, better to let you take all the risk.  Too many of those chanting outside-the-box mantras forget to open the lid and truly learn what’s inside.

Much as I like to prattle metaphorically, I must admit a lifelong affinity for the literal incarnation of these cubist devices.  Crafted of myriad materials from cardboard to mahogany to platinum, boxes represent one of the greatest inventions, a physical way to hold “stuff” every bit as efficiently as figurative boxes hold “ideas.”  Once I’ve emptied a box, I find it hard to discard.  I mean, look, it’s a perfectly good box; and one of those certainties in life is that at some point sooner than later, we all need another box.

Kids are quick to recognize potential in the box itself, their innocent indifference to expectation a state of grace that too many outgrow as they hurtle toward adulthood and all that inside-the-box versus outside-the-box thinking.  Why, just turn that crank, and maybe this go-round Jack will jump right out of the box—or will he?  How many times have you seen a kid put aside his birthday present, then opt to play with the box?  Look!—it’s a fort, a roller-coaster rocket, an unrealized diorama to host miniature fantasy realms, the perfect turbo-sled to zoom down that Little League World Series hill, Captain Jack’s time-capsule and treasure-chest transmogrificationator . . .

Then when you grow up and the world demands your earnest contributions, go ahead and try to think outside the box, if you want, but make sure to remember . . .  it’s just a box.  Maybe it contains precisely what you think you want, mail-ordered and delivered to your door.  It might sport festive wrap and tease you with the most amazing gift from someone you love.  It might very well cradle a lifetime’s cherished mementos hidden in some dusty attic, or the meager belongings of a gentle soul who passed her last days under nurses’ care far from home, her “stuff” now waiting to be claimed.

What’s in a box is your treasure, my junk.  What’s in a box, a trifle to you, the world to me.  What’s in a box, the essence of that which another deemed worthy of preserving.

And yes, the box is metaphor; but while we laud those who strive to think outside it, I decry those who forget what’s inside, lofty thinkers who don’t know Jack.  You don’t need think-speak from pretenders who never even bother to peek under that lid, to look, to learn, to ponder what and why.

You see, what truly lives inside the box is some very good thinking.  It’s the best of what legions before us conceived, then tested and refined.  It’s the rules you learn so you can break them judiciously for greater effect.  It’s the place with space when you’re ready to bring that imagination home.

It’s where we keep Jack until the time is right.

I like to see thinking outside the box, but I trust it most from those who prove they’ve mastered the art of thinking inside the box, too.  So keep an eye on what you know works, even as you seek what might work ever better.  Hold in, but look out!

I guess the best way to do that is: Be the box.

Achieve that, and the next big idea might just blow your lid off.

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