Dismantling the Boxes We Live In
This service led by Jinjer Stanton
I read a lot of novels about World War II when I was in high school and college. I felt like I knew what it was like to have trench foot at Guadalcanal or to spend a night hiding in a French farm house while German tanks rolled by. The words in the books were evocative and my imagination excellent. Yet I didn't need to imagine one thing: what it felt like to be a POW imprisoned by the Japanese in a cage too narrow to lie flat in and too short to stand straight in. One needn't imagine what one has experience of. I lived in a cage like that every day.
No one knew the cage (box) was there but me and most of the time I pretended it didn't exist. But it was always there. I could feel the pressure of it from outside forcing me to do things I didn't want to do and keeping me from doing things I couldn't name but desperately wanted to do. I used to feel like the only way out would be to go crazy. Yet that path was closed to me because I knew I was relentlessly sane. To scream and cry and kick my heels would only leave me with fallout to deal with. It wouldn't set me free.
We celebrate personal freedom in the USA. I did too, but without understanding what it meant. I was too busy meeting obligations and rebelling in small ways to see that most of us obligingly stay trapped in unhappy situations rather than step outside of the cages lovingly or hatefully built for us, with our collusion, by family and society.
I would smoke a pipe, because women aren't supposed to, and I refused to wear pink, because that would mean accepting roles women were expected to fill. There were other ways I acted out, but they didn't make me feel free.
The two major rules of society that I internalized were: 1) I (being female) must be sure that everyone around me feels good however bad I may feel. The corollary to that is, if other people are angry (sad, confused), it must be my fault and it's my job to make it right. And 2) Other people are more likely to be right about what I'm feeling and what I should do than I could ever possibly be. I did fundamentally oppose this one by refusing to marry or even have steady romantic relationships. My need to obey rule one would have forced me to forfeit all sense of self and before I was born, I promised myself I'd not fall into that particular trap.
Fear of breaking rules of which I had no knowledge dogged my every waking hour. Rather than do something wrong, I chose to do nothing. By itself that formed one wall of my box.
I went to college hungry for education. Much though I loved it, college was an excuse to stay in the box (the cage). It was an excuse to avoid, for a little while longer, the responsibilities of the workaday world. College represented structure and form that others recognized and honored yet I never intended it to be my ticket to a job or to marriage (the infamous MRS degree). In its way, it was another small rebellion against the confines of my box. I followed the rules by going to school but rebelled by not getting a career out of it.
I couldn't begin to imagined what real freedom might look like. I couldn't imagine that the world could be filled with delights unstolen or what it might feel like to stand up with nothing but the blue arch of sky above me.
From the college I escaped into one job box, then another, and another ... And I really began to feel the pinch.
I could have told you its exact physical dimensions as I pressed against walls and ceiling yearning to stand tall but I couldn't have told you who built it or that there had never been a door in the doorway. Like a wild thing caged its whole life, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to leave. Only now, looking back, can I see how I built it for myself. Wrenched from one household to another as a kid, I withdrew from the world. I built a space just large enough for me and my books. I began to initiate nothing and to do only what I was told to do. I built fine, thick walls (my Ôshell' Aunt Viv called it) and with the walls came judgment. I honored only the warrior virtues and dismissed love, and compassion as weakness. Intuition wasn't logical therefore it was just fuzzy-minded fantasy.
Even when I decided to learn astrology, it was so I could write the definitive article proving, using its own rules, that it was totally bogus. When my major test case, a stranger I disliked on sight, turned out to be accurate I banged right into the realization that some of my basic premises in life might be flawed.
Still, I remained steadfastly in my box. After all logical processes were necessary to its success. Even as I attended a weekly astrology discussion group, I maintained my self-made prison.
One night there was a guest at the discussion group. She was an elderly lady who kept the hosts busy arranging for her comfort right up until start time. It turned out she was a well-known professional psychic there to tell us about her abilities.
My pride in my logic and intellect was at war with my hunger to be told about the wondrous future that awaited me, you've read some of those same fairytales too. I was fascinated but superior. After all, astrology was at least built on a logical framework. Intuition had no such saving grace. Still, all evening I hungered for her to turn to me and reveal my hidden greatness.
She revealed wonders enough for others. My astrological mentor was told she would shortly host a TV show about astrology, for instance. I burned with jealousy. That prediction ought to have been mine.
The psychic answered questions and mentioned a few other predictions then declared the evening at an end, but before she left she went around the table tossing off one-line predictions for those who hadn't had one yet. When she came to me she said, "You have to get out of your box," and went on to the next person.
I was devastated. In order to hide that I pretended to be disgusted and offended. I went home and told the story to my roommate under the guise of a big joke, but when I went to bed, I wept hopelessly because I had no idea how to rid myself of the omnipresent box. It's almost a clichŽ these days to say that the first step toward solving a problem is identifying it. If there is an elephant in the living room and everyone ignores its presence, it stays and continues to occupy most of the space and to eat the snacks up before anyone else gets any. But as soon as someone says, "Hey, that elephant doesn't belong here." People can begin working out how to get her back to India where she belongs. So, having someone else see and name the box, I could no longer ignore it. That made it real and my feelings of entrapment valid. Slowly, I began to gather tools and look for chinks in the walls.
Is the box gone these many years later? Yes. But, its ghost still occasionally haunts me.
Now and then I am reminded of it because I run into someone else holding tight to his or her own box. I've tried over the years to help people out of their boxes. I've offered the tools that worked so well for me, and still they cling. I've come to understand that until a person is ready to choose to leave their own, personally designed box, my well-intentioned help is meaningless and, perhaps, annoying to them. Yet I remember a quote from Jan Willem de Wettering, "The teaching is never wasted." Meaning that when the person is ready, perhaps the tools I offered may come to mind.
At the same time, I've come to be very sparing in my advice. I no longer offer it unless it is requested. I understand now that I need to respect and honor the place each person is in and the path they have chosen which may not lead where mine has taken me.
This was truly brought home for me this last Christmas when I volunteered at an event meant to help people living in Minneapolis's inner city. Twice during the event I ran into an Native American woman with a badly bruised face. She was in the company of a couple of sullen bruisers, probably family members. I could feel the misery of her life. I could feel how tightly she clung to the box she lived in and though we were only a couple of feet from one another, I felt that the gap between us was oceanic or that her walls were made of pure lead. Even now, I grieve for her condition. But I know that whatever words I had in me to speak, however true, would have been an insult to her.
You may recognize the ghost of my box in my desire to take her out of the life she understood and show her what was possible. The desire to help others is a natural desire shared sometimes even by animals. The danger lies in assuming we know the other person needs. Sometimes the box a person lives in fulfills a vital function. People trying to help me did not understand what I needed until the Psychic woman came along. Her kindness hurt like hell, but it spoke to my experience in ways no other kindness had.
So, I ask hesitantly, are you living in a box? Is it still fulfilling a valid function in your life? Are you ready to begin to dismantle it?
If so, begin by consciously commitmenting to dismantling it. Then, find that still pool deep within and, like a pebble into a stream, drop the question: What must I do to become free of this box?
The answer may float back to you from that quiet place. It may come later when you're stuck in traffic or waiting in line at the bank. It may come from an aimless conversation with a stranger or from comforting an upset friend. But the inspiration for that first step will come. The challenge that will offer itself to you then is, will you take that first step?
Thank you for coming.
Namaste
For more from Jinjer Stanton, you can visit her website www.jinjerstanton.com and for more about meditation you can visit "Just One Percent", an offering of Miracles of the Spirit created by Jinjer Stanton.