Thinking Outside the Box Requires You to Have a Box to Think Out Of: You may have experienced such a dilemma in your life. Most likely, more often than you or any of us would care to share. If you haven’t, then I suspect you are blissfully blessed.
How we manage to box ourselves in from inside and outside influences may be just human nature. The predicament or the problems we create for ourselves requires us to dream up strategies to get us out of that blocked in feeling. I admit that outside influences, like other people, can set us up for feeling emotionally trapped. Those boxed-in feelings are not always the work of self.
When you come face-to-face with a problem that puts you in a box, and it looks like a giant mountain before you. Motivational strategists will often say, “when you’re facing a mountainous problem that you can’t overcome, go through it, go around it, or go under it.” That advice has some actionable validity. But usually, the box you’re in has big tall walls and a ceiling. You really have no idea how to get yourself out of it.
The painting I matched with this post reflects the misshapen boxes creative people often put themselves in. The pale pink triangle represents the desperate need to come up with an answer. The green lines and red dots represent our minds. Follow the triangle to the upper right purple shape. That’s where our thinking ends up. There we attempt to come up with a rational solution to the situation that put us in a box in the first place.
What is the solution? I, for one, may never know. If you are human, you possess the ability to think. It may be questionably out of tune with rational outcomes. But if you find yourself trapped inside a box corralling dilemmas, don’t become claustrophobic. Eventually, they will dematerialize through the power of your rational thoughts. If you can manage to make this happen, please let me know. It’s not all that philosophical. Like animals, we don’t like to be trapped, even if the trap is of our own making. Outside influences may have started the process. But inside influences can help you think outside of the box.
“The walls, the ceiling, and the floor were like a box, trapping and suppressing my freedom of thought. I discovered to escape that box; I needed to redress my thoughts into the outcomes I was seeking.”
Rod Jones Artist-Writer