Boxless in a Boxed-up World?

What if you had never been in a box?

I mean, from day 1!

I realized, I have never been in a box, well except the box of my own mind, which we're all in (our own minds that is, not mine — — ROFL) whether we realize it or not.

When I was a little, impressionable kid, my parents were in the U.S. Air Force. I say parents because it took both of them to perform a US Air Force job.

We moved every 18 months or so until I was 18. I never got into a social box, except the Outside Box, which was a hodgepodge place, where people could choose to like or dislike you or not, depending on their programming and any predilections of the moment. Nothing was expected of me by the people established in the society around me because everyone knew I'd be leaving soon. I did become expectation-less, invisible yet always there.

The friends I had were the ones who happened to actually like who I was at the moment, not because I was this person or that person's sister, daughter, etc., and they'd get in trouble if they did or didn't!

At home, my mother used to send me to my room to get my own thoughts!

That's right, one day, when I was perhaps eight, she was playing some Andy Williams on the stereo. She said, "I just love that song!" when "Begin the Beguine" began. Of course, being eight, I parroted her, "I do too!"

That's when she got all stern and foreboding and sent me to my room to get my own thoughts. "You must never have an opinion that is not truly yours!" she admonished as she closed the door on me (she did set my standard)!

Well, if you were eight, and locked in your room to get your own thoughts, what would you do?

I got my own thoughts.

When I was ten, my Dad gave me a book about the ten top religions in the world. He said, "Read this and make up your own mind about God and what is true!"

By that time I was getting pretty good at making up my own mind. I took that dictum from my Dad seriously as well (it was a dictum), and I did just that.

What I did not realize until recently is that all these experiences have made me boxless in a boxed-up world. I realized this while talking to a man who is frustrated about boxes and their limitations.

Now I understand that when I start talking and people look at me like they don't know what to do with what I just said, it is probably because I am boxless in their eyes. I'm talking from a place that they have never ever been before. They look at me weird because their moms, dads, and communities locked them in their rooms to think different things or one thing only, and now, that is what they do! Boxless. Different. Worlds.

All of us really.

c. 2004 TDHawkes