DAY 44 – KEY ASPECT: THE HUMAN PSYCHOLOGICAL BOX

I am in a toy store looking for a birthday present for my neighbors seven year old son. A boy is playing with a jack-in-the-box and hits a button on the side of the box that enables a puppet to pop out. He does this over and over again until his parents take him and they leave the store.

I start to think about people and the jack-in-the-box we put ourselves in. Since we live our lives in thoughts, with many of those silent thoughts being repeated over and over again, they eventually take on a life of its own. Developing steadfast beliefs that we don’t waiver from, we thus become confined to certain thoughts where we then have created our own individual psychological box.

Living in a psychological box there is less diversity and range of thoughts which ultimately limits ourselves into what may be possible. We can’t create new ideological paradigms and new ways of living life because we have become set in our ways. The past and present is thoroughly ingrained and the potential for doing something different is easily dismissed.

Imagine a human being living in a room and never leaving that room. The walls of the room surround him and he cannot escape being a physical prisoner of those four walls. The same can be said of one’s mind when we do not let new ideas enter the picture. Such limitations confines a person to a psychological room of set thoughts and set behaviors. This is the psychological box human beings have that defines each of us when we do not allow ourselves to consider and possibly adopt new ways of thinking about issues.

The human psychological box is at the heart of why people stay as they are for decades even though they know that what they are doing does not solve their problems. The rigidity of people to not move in another direction is a result of habitual thinking and habitual behaviors that keeps us stuck where we are. The world stays the same even though people want something different.

If we are to move towards something better we have to consider the merits of all new ideas. We have to compare them to what we now have and then determine if life will be better off with something new that we are not accustomed to. We do not automatically hold onto the existing ways of thinking and acting but allow ourselves the freedom to explore all possibilities. When we do not limit ourselves we have popped out of our psychological box and with this new freedom we will not be put back into the old box again. This is how individual and societal progress is made.

After buying a present and leaving the store I now realize that one of the most difficult things any of us can do is break free from one’s own psychological box that each person puts themselves into. Allowing ourselves to venture away from what we have become accustomed to opens up a world of creative possibilities that can successfully address personal as well as our collective societal issues.