For a number of years, I worked with a boss who encouraged us often to think outside the box, a
phrase that has, today, become so commonplace as to be ordinary. Still, whenever I hear the phrase I think of him and his desire for us to engage in extraordinary thinking.
While cleaning recently, I came across some remnants from a hamster cage, including the exercise wheel. As the image came to mind of our long-gone hamster running in the wheel within the cage, I thought again of the objective to “think outside the box.”
Life for our hamster was one of routine, engaging in the same behaviors day after day, getting the same results, including running in a wheel that went no where. Hamsters, it would seem, are not able to consider life outside the box as a possibility and then take the necessary action to make it happen.
If they were, our hamster might have piled up enough hamster litter around the wheel to make it stationary and then use the wheel to climb out of his cage. A simple wire mesh cover wouldn’t withstand for long the impassioned gnawing of hamster teeth, and voila, life outside the box!
Of course, such a life is fraught with danger and challenges, not the least of which is the need to be self-sufficient, to secure sustenance and shelter, to learn to navigate a new environment full of other creatures who may either hurt you or help you build a new community of like-minded hamsters. It is easy to see why some hamsters might eventually go running back to the safety of their cage and their wheel, while others never even consider life outside four walls.
Obviously, hamsters, like other caged animals, are not endowed with the ability to consider the meaning of their lives. Reflective thinking is the domain of the human mind. Still, even with that gift, we are often unable to consider other options. We live in fear of the unknown and the uncertain, and retreat to the security of familiar behaviors even when the results make us miserable.
Sometimes the most confining of boxes are not the circumstances of our lives, but, rather, our attitudes and our decisions, serving as self-constructed walls which ultimately restrict our growth. And surely, we were meant to grow. God’s creation is our model. Within the living realm of nature, there is fluidity and movement, folding and unfolding. There are no squares, no boxes, except those we construct ourselves.
All life is designed by God for growth and change, for becoming. But growth is our choice. We can nurture it, or we can stop it dead in its tracks. God would tell us, as he directed Moses to tell the people of the Exodus, “Choose life!”