Boxes

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about boxes.

I don't think that this thought pattern is delirious or even peculiar. It's justifiable. I'm moving next week. As I write this, I'm sitting in a room filled with boxes, after a full day of packing boxes, typing on a computer which arrived in a box, listening to music on a phone that I only recently unboxed.

Boxes are a staple of our culture that haven't been endowed with the same level of cultural notoriety as I think they should. When was the last time you thought about the eccentricity of the mundane cardboard box? Is it not utterly mad that we live in a world where one hundred billion cardboard boxes appear each year, to ride in the metallic bellies of mechanical beasts that hardly any of us understand? Each box travels more of the world than most of us will in our whole lives, and that they should is the bare minimum expectation. God knows what happens when they fail to meet this expectation: high prices, unrest, starvation, and general misery. We live in a world conquered by and dependent on the box.

Yet, have we not always been beholden to the box? The Ark of the Covenant, one of the most legendary, sought after religious artifacts of all history, is a humble wooden box covered in gold. When the Pharaohs were buried with their riches, their tombs were filled with boxes of food and oils to help them reach the afterlife. The four most important boxes were filled with the Pharoah's own internal organs on the belief that he would need them again in the spirit world. Then, when this gorey, poetic, barbaric, and affectionate packing ceremony was nearly complete, they put the Pharaoh himself in a box, sealing him in his tomb.

For as antiquated as this seems, we don't live dissimilarly to the Pharaohs. Yes, for all our technological wonders, the dasein, the uniquely human awareness of our existence and our eventual non-existence, has changed little. From the box of our mothers womb to the box of our casket, it is from the box that we arrive in this world, and it is to the box that many of us shall return when we leave it. On some level, our culture understands this. It's why we celebrate when a person leaves a box– whether it be a womb, an uncomfortable airplane, or a dead end job– and mourn when someone is put into one. Perhaps, this understanding is why I've been told my whole life to think outside the box, to think beyond the womb and casket, beyond simple binaries.

Next week, I'm moving from this box in Lawton to another in Oklahoma City; and yet, despite the fundamental similarities in the geometry of my current and future living spaces, there is a key difference between these two boxes. For the past eighteen years, I've lived in a box taped shut. Sure, the tape has been losing its grip as I've rammed my head against it, and sure, I've found holes in the corners. And sure, it is safer to live in a taped box for the young and the foolish, but I've never lived in a box without tape. I want to live in a box without tape.

I'm ready. I've tried to think outside the box. Now, I'm going to live outside the box.