On Discovering Boxes

By the time the phrase "thinking outside of the box" came into common usage, I'd been through so many major life changes I couldn't understand the metaphor.  "What box," I thought.  "Why not just think about all the things that are and watch them in action?"  The concept of thinking symbolically was foreign to me since the great majority of my thinking is done by direct visual modeling and then only once the idea is complete is it translated into the symbols we call language.  It's kind of a disadvantage socially, as I just can't keep up in real time.  The advantage, though, is that I see things so differently from most people that when I can get my insights into the conversation it's usually a good thing.

A colleague of mine recently informed another colleague that not only do I not think inside the box, I don't even think inside the warehouse.  Well, what I do for a living consists quite unofficially of wandering around the warehouse looking for boxes and describing those boxes to their inhabitants.  You see, in order to escape from prison you need to know not only that you're in prison, but where the walls are and what they're made of.  Only then can you begin to think about the walls rationally and probe them for weakness.  If you see your prison as "just the way it is," then you're trapped by your own mind far more thoroughly than by the walls themselves.
For me the problem is the reverse, and just as troublesome in many circumstances.  I'm so far out I can't even perceive "the box," so I tend to expect people to be able to move freely also and understand me as I speak... but I've only recently learned how to speak with regard to the baggage of layered meanings that the boxes place upon words.  The box acts as a mistranslator, separating two people with a common language that isn't actually common at all.  The perspective from out here is very helpful, but until we both understand the box we have no common frame of reference.  Sure, some gems get through (both ways) undamaged, but for the most part that's by luck as much as intent.

So we come to A Night In The Warehouse.  In public, things are harder than dealing one-on-one.  It's dark, there aren't any lights, and nearly all the boxes are charcoal gray.  They're all similar, constructed out of symbols made from generations of teachings both good and bad, traditions, and local cultural practices.  They're all different, with bumps and bulges and dents from where their occupants have run into them or they've run into each other.  Some are old-fashioned wood or corrugated paper, some are high-tech carbon fiber, but most are some kind of hodgepodge of materials gathered in expedience.  The boxes overlap and share some space, yet the shared spaces have walls that only affect some.  The people in the boxes can see each other, but they still can't see through all the walls, just as they cannot see the walls themselves.

I can hear my footfalls on the hard floor, and they echo off the boxes.  The echoes are confusing at first, with all the different materials, sizes, shapes, angles and bumps.  The geometry is insanely complex.  It's hard to know what I'm hearing.  What are these things?  From one of the boxes I hear a clear, calm voice: "what's that?"

"It's just me."

"Just who?  Where are you?"

"I'm walking the warehouse floor.  Where are you?"

"What warehouse?  What are you talking about?"

I fumble around in the darkness, following the voice until I strike the box that contains its owner.

"There, I found you."

"I'm in a crowd of people and there's no one new here."

"To me it seems you're alone in a box, in a warehouse full of similar boxes."

"You're crazy."

"No, we're just both partially blind."

"How can that be?"

And so it begins.  For both of us.