Little Boxes

When writing my book, Getting Used to Weird, I started looking for quotes from famous people which would illustrate my new beliefs.

I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

Paul McCartney

My character Angela’s conversations with angels, spirit guides, Jesus, and God, had led her away from a life of conforming to ‘normal’ behaviour, to a life which she and I would have considered weird, not very many years before.

I realised that it is normal for people to place everything and everyone into little boxes.  It is a way for us to make sense of the world.  If we can’t find a box to put someone or something in, it causes us confusion.  This is the reason that isolated tribes, witnessing the arrival of men in flying machines, might think of them as gods – they can’t find another box that they fit in.

It is normal for us all to try to conform to what society expects of us, to try ‘to fit in’, so that we can please other people, eliminating their confusion.  But there is a reason that this feels like you are in a prison, from which escape is difficult.  You have placed yourself in one of those little boxes in order to please others.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Perhaps it is time now to break out of all of those boxes which others have placed you in, and in which you have placed yourself.  Just as prisoners, who have been incarcerated for a long time, find the outside world daunting at first, as Angela and I found, when you first break out of your boxes, life gets a little scary.  However, after a while you realise that the world outside of the boxes is a magical place.

Just as a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis discovers the magic of flying on invisible air, as we escape from our chrysalises, we find that God has provided a magical world to support us.

As we emerge from the boxes of conformity, we need to discover who we really are.  We have spent such a long time being who someone else wants us to be, it can take a while to find the real you.  But once we discover the truth about ourselves and start to live that truth, there is no stopping us; we are ready to soar.

Let me leave you with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.