“And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.” Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds
If you have ever moved (and I’m sure that most of you have), you have to find an organized way to take all of your accumulated belongings and transport them from one place to another. The easiest and most logical way to accomplish this is to use boxes. We pack things up that belong to a room or are associated with each other by type and put them in nice, neat little boxes with a label so we know what to do with everything when we get there. It’s a great system.
Unfortunately we also apply that system to anything that we want to organize including other people. We mentally group them together and put them in boxes and then label them so we know exactly where everyone goes and what to do with them. It’s a system that works well for things but not so much for people.
We become bound by our ideas of each other and forget that people are constantly evolving. When you pack up your things and move them and then open the boxes they contain the same things in exactly the same place (as long as nothing was broken – bubble wrap people!). It’s comforting. As humans, we like comfort. We have spent all of human existence focusing on how to make ourselves more comfortable in our daily lives. We like easy. We are lazy. But that same drive that makes us want to simplify our lives, make it easy on ourselves, make everything comfortable, creates a problem for us. This desire to simplify things doesn’t apply to other humans. We can’t just put people in boxes and label them and carry those boxes around from place to place with us. Yet, we do it all the time. Unfortunately, we don’t take the time to really open the boxes and look inside. If we did we might find something entirely different then what we put in there.
We are bound by our thoughts about ourselves and each other. Our desire to create a comfortable image of other people, one that makes sense to us, limits how we can interact with one another. We have preconceived ideas about how we should live our life and we apply that to everyone else. We have to fight our innate desire to make ourselves comfortable and expand our minds to see who people really are. Humans are complicated creatures. There is no one label that can clearly define anyone.
As long as we continue boxing and labeling everyone, it is going to be difficult for us to advance as a species. The very act of boxing and labeling is one of limitation. So the next time you pull out your box and your permanent marker, consider tossing them in the garbage instead. Yes it’s more work to really know and understand each person but it’s the only way to get past your own boundaries. Your boundaries are all within you.
M.-
Unbound 