Sometimes I am good at it but many times I'm not. Thinking outside the box is what people have urged me to do in job hunting and I find the older I get the less sense it visibly makes to think outside the box. I'm not old but I'm not young enough to have the world, as it were, before me.
Being young means you can fool yourself into thinking you have more realistic options than you really have. As Joan Didion put it in a certain grimly polemical essay, the dream of going to New York City and becoming a sculptor or painter or famous poet is not a fantasy that figures prominently in the minds of consenting adults. It does, however, figure prominently in the minds of children. The dream of being a rock star, what post-pubescent kid hasn't dreamed of being a rock star of some kind in some field? I admit it was a propensity I had in my youth and as I am somewhat older I may have the problem of overcompensating for that youthful idealism.
I remember being in a band in college and while in college we entered into a talent show. My bandmates thought we did a good job. I thought we did all right but we were playing a cover and it just didn't seem like the kind of cover that would necessarily net a win. My friends in the band thought for sure we were going to win. One of them said that when we won we shouldn't make too much of a thing of it. Being that the setting was what it was I was more glad that we were playing in front of more people than we'd probably ever play the rest of our lives. The MC congratulated me on our band doing a good job and at the end of the day the band didn't win. A few friends told us later that we were robbed. But while it was disappointing to not "win" why should I have thought that winning proved something? I would rather we have won for some original material and not for a cover of someone else's song.
I admit that my whole life I have puzzled over the balance of realistic expectations and following dreams. Are dreams really worth building a life around when dreams can be unattainable through things you have no control over? I dreamed of being a fighter pilot (what American kid didn't at some point consider the possibility), I dreamed of being a pilot. That quickly was revealed to be physically impossible. When I wanted to learn to play the clarinet I was heartbroken to discover that there was just no financial possibility of doing that, it was one of the more memorable moments for me of a long-faded childhood.
It is easier to remember the miseries of discovering something I wanted wasn't possible than to remember the little victories and happier memories of childhood. The disasters loomed so large they dwarfed the happier times and, indeed, made it more painful to remember the good times in the end. I suppose to put it in hyperbolic, maudlin terms, it is a greater sorrow to remember the beauty of Jerusalem by the waters of Babylon than to see the ruins of Jerusalem itself.
For a lot of my life I have felt like I needed to fit inside the boxes other people told me I needed to fit into. Even people who said I shouldn't have to fit into someone else's boxes often seemed to be priming me for the simple bait and switch, that the box I needed to be in was not the box person X was telling me I needed to put myself into to be fully human but the box that he or she, person Y, was telling me would make me truly human.
The phrase thinking outside the box has become inert to me, irrelevant, beyond the point of wearisom. I feel like I have gone through my life not being sure what the box really was, let alone how one was supposed to somehow think outside whatever that box was that people wouldn't tell me about. You can think outside the box if you don't know what the box is and people won't tell you but much of my life I have felt like the problem is that people want me to think INSIDE THE BOX, specifically, their box, the box they feel they shouldn't have to spell out for me because, well, that would be wasting their time.
I'd like to figure out what the boxes are but I don't feel like I'm smart enough. I often wonder if I can even fit inside that box, whatever box people seem to be saying I need to fit into. If I get told I shouldn't think in terms of being in any box at all, well, that's just yet another box. Even people who have told me I need to take risks are still basically telling me what to do. It gets my stymied.
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