Grasshopperism #18 – “Get Rid Of The Box (There Is No Need To Live Outside The Box If There Is No Box)”
People sometimes talk about The Box. They talk about living outside the Box or thinking outside the Box. I realized last week, when I was on the beach talking with some friends, that it’s impossible to live or think outside the Box if there is NO Box.
What if you have no Box to think outside or inside? What if you have no Box to live outside or inside? What if you’ve never had a Box? And how do you get rid of The Box if you have one?
I believe The Box can be defined in a lot of ways. It’s a very subjective idea, but one that comes up so often it must have some kind of loose definition to each one of us. So, I asked a few people. People living here in Paamul, my friends, who might be people that others might say are the kind of people who live Outside The Box.
Some said that The Box was society and society’s norms. Some equated The Box to economic and religious rules. Others said that it had to do with what people won’t do. Others said it had to do with reinvention, and that the Box was something to leave behind.
I think The Box is a human construction, a perception, a very blurry and deceptive way to look at what is possible and what is not. I think that almost anything can be defined in terms of The Box. Our lives, our jobs, our families, wealth, the countries we’re born in, the invisible boundaries between countries, the invisible boundaries between people. It’s also The Box that we all live in, known as the universe, and beyond that, the Milky Way galaxy. It’s also time and space. Metaphysically it can be expanded to more than just societal rules. So, really everything could fit into some Box, if we subscribe ourselves to it. Even our own consciousness.
So, yeah. Big mind blowing stuff. Whoa, Nelly. All right. I’ll stop. I’ll pull back and say what I believe The Box is for this Grasshopperism, and why I think The Box is something we can get rid of. It’s a concept we human beings use to apply the word ‘should’ to ourselves. Examples could include: “I should go to college.” “I should have children.” “I should have a good job.” “I should save up for retirement.” “I should wait to go on vacation.” “I should buy a house.” “I should exercise today.” “I should get married.” “I should be a straight and not gay.” “I should be a man about this.” “I should be a man if I was born a man.” “I should believe in God.” “I should meditate.”
It’s also when we use the term ‘shouldn’t. Like: “I shouldn’t quit this job. I have to pay my debts off.” “I shouldn’t go to Chile because I need to pay off my student loans.” “I shouldn’t sell my place and move to Europe.” “I shouldn’t learn an instrument; I don’t have time.” “I shouldn’t talk to that person; they were mean to me.” “I shouldn’t give this relationship a chance; my friends think she’s a bitch.” “I shouldn’t get a divorce; my religion says it’s a sin.” “I shouldn’t trust that person because people are bad.”
‘Should’s and ‘shouldn’ts. ‘Can’s and ‘can’ts. ‘Supposed-to's and ‘supposed-to-not’s. What. The. Fuck.
The Box is what you put yourself in because others tell you what you should and shouldn’t do. You should make a certain amount of money. Do a certain job. Have the right amount of debt. Take the right amount of risk. Date the correct people. Love the right people. Live within the boundaries defined. Look the way we say. Listen to what we say. Watch what we watch. Smell and eat and taste and swallow what we smell and eat and taste and swallow.
We is Us. We created the Box. Us. Humans. Our consciousness. Our ethics and our morals. Our cultures and our sub-cultures. I truly believe that most beliefs in the world, the ‘Great Religions’, all say very similar things. The same concepts. They are: To Love. To be good. Not to hurt people. Not to kill people. And generally speaking, just don’t be a dick. Yes, I believe that what Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, Moses, Buddha and Lao Tzu were basically saying was, “You’re a human being. Please don’t be a dick.”
To me this means: Don’t harm people. Don’t drop bombs on people. Don’t hurt children and please try to be good to animals, too. But everything else, generally speaking, is ok. If you want to live in a Box of your symbolic choosing, then please go right ahead. If it’s comfortable there, that’s fine with me.
But here’s the amazing thing I realized: I am comfortable having No Box. I never had one. Or if I did, it was a very, very large box. And it’s grown so now it’s maybe the universe or infinity or beyond. Just like what Buzz Lightyear said. That’s my Box. One where I do my best not to harm anyone in any way ever. Beyond that, though, to look at what The Box is and how you can free yourself from it, is this Grasshopperism.
I read this yesterday in an except from advice to various Buddhist practitioners in prison by Ven. Robina Courtin from ‘Notes On The Path To Enlightenment’:
“I remember in particular one program about nature by an Englishman, Attenborough, who is very well known in England. He was discussing a particular group of ants in Africa and their habitat, their anthill, and explaining how amazing they were. For example, he pointed out, their home, which was maybe ten feet tall, had many levels, where different ants did different things; how skillful they were. And how their basement, if you like, was kept at a very precise temperature for this reason and that. He said that these ants had evolved in their sophistication over the years and was truly awestruck at their talents.
The Buddhist view could be, in a sense – big deal! Ants in their nature do not have the mental capacity to calculate technological things, but the fact that they seemed to do these things by instinct shows that the karmic imprints to do them are strongly in their minds – and that these imprints are from human lives, when that mental capacity was evident. These busy creatures, all following their instincts, were simply reincarnated humans who obviously had developed very sophisticated technical skills – look at today’s world! – but because these skills had been developed and carried out as humans in conjunction with huge attachment and grasping and the rest, these delusions had caused them to be born as lower creatures who nevertheless kept the imprints of their technical training.”
No matter if you choose to believe in reincarnation or not – I’m still not sure of the idea myself – but what is amazing about this couple paragraphs is that, yes, it's phenomenal that these ants could construct something as amazing as this giant ant hill - as equally amazing as constructing a cathedral or a skyscraper - but these ants do only this. That is their Box. All they can do is their very minute & specific task in this ant hill.
Do you know what would have been more amazing to me? If one of these Ants had said to his Ant buddies: “Dudes, I’m outta here. I’m gonna go play the ukulele.” And that Ant did it!
If I were wandering along in the African jungle and I saw a 10-foot ant hill, I’d be pretty amazed. Fascinated. A little scared even. But if I looked down a few feet from the ant hill and saw one ant playing a teeny, tiny ukulele, well, then I’d be awestruck. I’d freak out. I might pass out from shock. How cool would that be???
That’s what I mean about getting rid of The Box. The Ant who plays the ukulele, the Any who leaves the ant hill, they are getting rid of The Box. They left the Box behind. But, here’s the thing, what if there was never an ant hill to begin with? What if you were an ant that gravitated to playing the ukulele from the start without common knowledge about ant hills or building them? What if, after playing the ukulele and living out your ant life, you suddenly discovered that other ants actually built ant hills? You, The Ukulele Playing Ant thought this was a pretty cool thing to do, but when the Anthill Building Ants said, “You should come build this ant hill with us. You’re an ant. That’s what you do. That’s what you should do, actually. You can’t play the ukulele. You’re an Ant. You should be building ant hills.”
What would you do? How would you feel? This is how my life has been.
I grew up in Minnesota where people ice skate and play hockey throughout the long winters that reaches as low as minus 30 or 40 F. Some of these same Minnesotans actually love the winter when it gets that cold. They speak with accents like in the Cohen Brothers movie “Fargo". Most of them live in homes in neighborhoods where neighbors are on both sides of them and across the street and maybe across an alley, too. There is a cultural identity there called Minnesota Nice where people are extraordinarily nice to you – but it’s a surface nice-ness – and secretly some of them loathe you or may want to put an ice ogger into your skull.
Me. I grew up in a 100-year-old farmhouse in the country in Minnesota. I walked down a quarter mile drive way everyday to catch the school bus and listened to the wind whip at 20 and 30 and 40 miles per hour across the dead fields of snow covered wheat and old corn stalks, vibrating the electrical wires so hard that sounded like they would snap over my head. I had black figure skates instead of hockey skates. I hated the winter with every single frozen bone in my little body. I didn’t have an accent from “Fargo”. My dad was from Nebraska and he never had one – maybe I spoke like him or maybe I just didn’t ever speak like the other people. My dad was a Vietnam veteran and worked at a prison. He was gone most of the time working. My other friends’ dads worked jobs at offices or factories or schools and none of their dad’s had been in Vietnam in 1969. My dad had a beard and long hair and a Volkswagen van with “Reagan’s Here The End Is Near” sprayed painted on the front of it – he spray-painted the front of it himself the day after Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1979. My friend’s dads had trucks.
My mom smudged the house with sage, read from the Moosewood Cookbook, was vegetarian, had a Women’s Spirituality Group, bathed in front of me naked – there was a lot of naked-ness at our house – and had girlfriends with names like Lumber. Other kid’s moms made hot dishes with crumbled potato chips on top and had friends with names like Mary who played the piano at the Lutheran church on Sundays.
I did play the piano like old Mary. But other kids played hockey or trombone in the band. Whatever Box I thought I knew was so different from the other kids that I didn’t even know how to fit into The Box the other kids fit into. The jeans I wore sometimes had holes in the patches that covered the holes. My belt buckles and belts came from The Joint, where my Dad worked, fashioned by inmates at the prison. My swing sets were made from bags – so much so that my favorite swing was called The Bag Swing. My dad smoked pot and paraphernalia was kept hidden but within reach. We had no carpets, we had rugs. We had no shower, we had a bathtub. We had no washer and dryer, we had the laundromat. We had no neighbors, except one, the Landlord, Mr. Moreim, who was such a closeted homosexual that I believe it gave him a hump in his back from denying it. After he evicted my family and I from our farm house in 1988 because I had a 16th birthday party filled with Punk Rock looking kids, his hump only grew. The Hunchback Of St. Cloud Minnesota.
Once, for kindergarten show ’n’ tell, I brought my Evel Knievel doll with a red cape sewn on the back made out of red corduroy. My mom had cleverly sewn the cape on his back and told me he was Superman now. I was totally cool with that. My Evel Knievel doll had lost his hands and feet – the metal inside his rubber exterior had long since deteriorated – and this feetless and handsless Evel Knievel - the same 6 inch superhuman that had once flown through the air using piles of comic books as his wind-up motorcycle ramp – was, for all my 5-year-old superhero purposes, now Superman. The other kids didn’t think so and they laughed at me. I didn’t know why. My Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Knutsen, got mad at me for using words that were too big. She put me in the hall for entire afternoons for saying that “I didn’t care what we did that day.” And, at the end of the school year, she wrote me down as being a kid who should be put in the low Reading and Math groups. I went to 1st Grade and studied low level math and reading and loved it. It was pie. It was butter. It was so easy, I never had to think. And I don’t get bored – born with I-never-get-bored DNA - so I amused myself with imagination. What did Bill and Jane and Spot illustrations get up to in their time off from teaching snot-nosed 1st Graders how to read and do math. Were Bill & Jane up to something naughty?
2nd Grade came and they kept me in the same math and reading groups. It was cake. Halfway through 3rd Grade, when I was 7 years old, they moved me out of the lower level and beyond the high levels into the Gifted Group. Then, the kids really made fun of me. I was no longer too dumb for the low level nor even too smart for the high levels, I was beyond that. And so, I was in 2 different classes each day and never in one solid home room, walking hallways on my lonesome, and having occasional after school “gifted” sessions with 4 other young, little students. Mrs. Knutsen apologized to my Mom 3 years after kindergarten for doing that to me – keeping me in low reading and math groups – but what she did was make me into me.
In this way, and other small and large ways, my Box was never defined. It was SMASHED open for me. And THANK YOU!
Thank you, Mrs. Knutsen for instilling in me the very notion that teachers don’t necessarily know anything unless they're good at their jobs – and for making me realize that a mentor is not a teacher but someone you really look up to - a Hero not a Witch!
Thank you, Hockey Playing Assholes who beat me up and chased me down and shoved me over on my little yellow Stingray bike – I learned that ice is hard and water is soft, and I prefer warm sand on my bare feet to 2 pairs of thick socks and 12 foot piles of snow & parking lot filth!
Thank you, Kurt Airsman for wanting to kick my ass in high school, and when I fell to my knees and yelled rape you never touched me again – thereby forever proving that brains are better than brawn.
Thank you, burning, boring Guitar Players for not understanding piano players – you made me stand out – you made me get more girls and get more gigs.
Thank you, Minnesota for being cold and brutal and emotionally malnourished– you drove me out – far out into the world to travel and discover and learn and be larger than anything your small boxes could hold me inside.
Thank you, College Professors for being so bad at your jobs that I did my own independent studies while at university and ended up in Prague, DJing and working for Art & Literature magazines and meeting Sacco Koster who booked all my European tours!
Thank you, California for being so strange that I wanted to learn all about you – my personal sociology experiment – and then to discover that home is anywhere your mind can take you – not necessarily just where you lay your head.
Thank you, Pain itself, for making me strive and search all my life for a way to kill you – only to return to you - Pain, as a source of inspiration for art and for the ever increasingly wonderful world of my mind – finally accepting that you and I, Pain, are the same - we are one!
Thank you, Cops for arresting me and taunting me and following me around and falling in love with me only to remind me that you are exactly, in every way, what I am not – that you define the Stormtrooper, the Imperial Empire, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Captain Hook – that you are the villains, and Pirates, like me, are the Heroes – and that The Box you live and work in is tantamount to a giant ant hill with absolutely no art or merit – except to serve and protect...no one but yourselves!
Thank you, Seattle music scene for being so rock-centric that I moved to San Francisco to do Tom Waits-inspired music and this unfolded into a greater world of art and music and travel than I could ever have truly envisioned!
Thank you, Surfers for being such a hard group of people to fall in with – you Nazi Punk Surfers – so hard in your knowledge of the sea - and knowing that there are so few waves to go around that very few are let in to the Pack - to your Box – that you inspired me, with every part of my soul and being, to surf even more - to be one of you – to fit inside the Box you wouldn’t let me in!
And thank you, Box, for existing only to remind that you never had to exist in the first place.
The Box is to be burned. Set the cardboard aflame. The Box is to remove the milk cartons and milk bottles it carries and smash it all in the streets. The Box is gas, is vapor, is the ether. It is not lava, not boulders, not concepts or words. The Box is not to be believed in or to shape yourself to fit inside.
The Box is what you confine yourself to, to say “I can’t” when really “you can”! It is the excuse. The reason against. It is fear, pure unadulterated fear, that grows as you grow older. The Box is money, if you let it be. It is poverty, if you it let be. It is your home, your house and your children, if you let them be. The Box is not to be lived inside or outside or in between. It is not a square hole in a round peg, or a round peg in a square hole. It is censorship. It is control. It is judgment and it is prison. The Box is the very cells you keep yourself in.
According to The Expeditioner.com, as of February 2014, only 46% of Americans have a valid passport. That means that less than half of Americans can legally leave the United States. 54% of Americans live in a self-imposed Box. They are not allowing themselves to see any more of the world than their own country. This, to me, is incredibly sad. But, again, if you choose to live inside a Box, I will not judge you for it. I won’t understand it and I will find it sad, but I will accept your decision.
If you don’t believe in my concept of The Box, then I’m guessing you do believe in the idea that a prison cell is a Box. A Box human beings put other humans beings in. And, the startling statistics in the U.S. about imposing a Box on other human beings are enragingly, startlingly frightening.
According to the Washington Post, here’s what Democrat Hillary Clinton said in a speech at Columbia University on April 29, 2015: “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population.”
And here is what Republican Rand Paul said in a news release on his web site on March 9, 2015: “Though only 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States, it is home to 25 percent of the world’s prison population. … Not only does the current overpopulated, underfunded system hurt those incarcerated, it also digs deeper into the pockets of taxpaying Americans.”
These quotes were fact checked by the Washington Post. They are correct. Approximately 500 out of every 100,000 Americans are in prison. That means that for every 200 Americans, 1 of us Americans is in prison.
Imagine how many people you see everyday. As you drive down the highway in traffic, as you sit in your office, as you look out the window, as you watch television or search through the internet. Imagine how many people you see. Out of the 199 people you see, the 1 you don’t see is in prison. Imagine the number that have been in prison already and imagine the number that will be in prison in the future. These are your children. This is what you pay taxes for. These are the Boxes you put people in, Americans. Me included. I’m also an American, so I’m also responsible.
The most accurate metaphor I can give for The Box is prison. And the United States Of America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. More than China. More than anywhere. More people kept in forced, confined, locked Boxes than anywhere else. Every person sitting in prison costs every tax paying American money. This is a Box on many levels that is incomprehensible.
Why I’m writing about prisons and passports is to define Boxes on a scale that is physical. Metaphorically, we all have Boxes of some kind (even me who says I have No Box). Our own bodies could be seen as Boxes that limit us with death freeing us of our bodies.
What I’m asking you to do is, Grasshopperistically, free yourself of your Box today. Book a flight to somewhere you’ve never been. Go buy that instrument you’ve always wanted to play. Say “No” to something you’ve always said “Yes” to. Laugh when it’s inappropriate. Speak out of turn. Quit your job. Go ahead, do it. You hate it. Put your house up for sale. Be nice when you’re in a bad mood. Have sex with your husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend – it’s been awhile. Go out for dinner, you have the money. Go get a fucking passport if you don’t have one – it’s incredibly easy! Buy tickets to see a play, a band, an opera. Go to a museum. Give someone a giant hug for so long it hurts. Play with toys. Dig out some old action figures or Barbie dolls. Be unafraid to give a flying fuck what people think of you & what you’re doing.
If you have to, think of me sitting here shirtless in the Mayan Riviera, typing under a palapa roof, the air at about 75 degrees F, wearing nothing but board shorts and a piece of amber around my neck, listening to Ludovico Einaudi and Leonard Cohen on Spotify by the beach on a Tuesday afternoon. If you need to use me as a symbol, to think “I can do that, too”, please do. If you can envision what I’m doing and that you want to do that, do it. But, please do it your own way, because your vision will be different from mine.
Go to wherever you want. Don’t wait to retire, don’t wait to win the lottery and don’t wait to die. Don’t watch a reality show to vicariously live through them, go do it yourself. And, if you’re comfortable where you are, just do that. It’s fine. It’s cool. Just don’t be a dick. Be a good person. But learn. Try. Please try to learn. So that the human race can be better than yesterday. So that we don’t end up a race of New Neanderthals. Learn. Burn. Learn from and then burn your Box. Learn like a new born baby and burn like a comet on the sky, Grasshoppers. There is no Box, there is only you.
Please reblog.
To learn about about my Grasshopperisms, being a Grasshopper, my other writing projects and for Artist & Media Consulting, email me at [email protected]