I am quite good at replication. Indeed, I am very adept of taking that which is, whatever that is, and repeating it over and over. In fact, I can repeat any number of things to repetitive perfection which sometimes turns into repetitive redundancy. I can do that quite well because I’m quite familiar with that which I am repeating. Whatever it is that I’m doing I’ve likely done it many times before; many thousands of time before. And because I’ve done it so many times before, I know it very, very well. And because I know it very well it is both ‘familiar’ and ‘comfortable.’ And once something becomes both ‘familiar’ and ‘comfortable,’ there is a strong likelihood that I’m going to repeat it all the more.
This personally arresting dilemma rests in the fact that I genuinely love familiarity and comfort. I love them because they’re familiar and comfortable. I love them because they give me permission to live squarely within my box when I so often feel the pull to step outside of my box. I love them because they’re the natural response of my frightened humanity, so to embrace them is simply to embrace who I am and there is absolutely no shame in that. I love them because they don’t demand great things of me other than to sacrifice everything that lies outside of the box, and I figure that the trade-off of trying new things as set against abandoning familiarity and comfort just doesn’t make enough sense.
The Scourge of Familiarity and Comfort
But then I am left with the terribly unsettling and perpetually troubling dilemma that the vast majority of this thing that we call life lies somewhere outside of my box; sometimes way, way outside of my box. Whatever the scant few things that lay within the terribly limited confines of my box might be, they are but the slightest microcosm of this far-reaching existence of ours. Oh yes, it is all quite familiar and comfortable in here. Yet, it is unbearably limiting. It can be utterly suffocating. It permits absolutely no vision beyond the constricting parameters of the box. And it can deprive me of experiences to the point that I am left blindly ignorant, perpetually naïve, experientially anemic, and completely dead right in the very act of living.
Courage and Boxes
It is reasonable to say that life within a box is existence feigning life. Life within my box is my artificial rendering of what I assume life to be, or how my fear crushes it tasteless, or how my history was built in boxes, or how my lackluster vision would prefer it all to be in order to keep me perpetually safe and rarely disappointed. It is nothing of a robust adventure or the tantalizing call of things great and wild. It is life throttled and tamed, for life within a box can be nothing but a rogue and adventuresome beast with all of the vigor and vitality run right out of it.
Boxes and the New Year
By nature, we are a people of boxes. Therefore, it is not that we abandon them. Rather, it is that we utilize our boxes as a potent resource to help us move beyond our boxes. It is living with our boxes not as a place of residence, but as a point of departure. We must see them as a place of support as we venture outside of the box, not as limits that keep us within the box. Our box is a platform from which we launch, not a prison within which we exist. It is not a walled fortress within which we cower, rather it is a richly accessible cache from which we draw. It is where we begin, not where we end.
Conclusion
Our boxes will enslave us or enable us. The role they play will be dictated by our choices as our boxes are indeed a compilation of our choices. They will enslave us only if we construct them accordingly and give them permission consistently. Our boxes are the very vehicle that will propel us into a New Year that is not some raspy or perpetually chafing sequel of all the other New Year’s. To ignite our New Year in this manner we must realize that our box is our blessing, not our abode.
Familiarity and comfort. They will build boxes or they will challenge us to build bridges from our boxes. And this New Year, we will make that choice yet again. Indeed, may we make the choice of bridges over boxes.
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC