On the TV Series Battlestar Galactica, Captain Adama asks Starbuck, a top woman pilot, to design a battle plan that will work. With almost 50,000 lives depending on the outcome, he asks her to think outside of the box. She answers, “I live outside the box.”
In the book, Children of The Mind – one of the follow up books to Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – travelers move instantly from place to place by going “Outside.”
Outside of the box, where there is no box. This is Reality. This is freedom. Yet, how many times during the day, do we put ourselves in a box, or a variety of boxes, and live there.
A few years ago, I started a list of things I said I would never do, that I actually ended up doing. There were so many of them, I stopped counting. Here are three from that list:
We had driven up the coast from San Diego to visit a neon museum located on Traction Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. It was a hot, dry day, without any trees in sight. Concrete was everywhere. As I surveyed the area, I said to my traveling companion, “Geez, who would ever live here!”
A few years later, after many upheavals and changes, I looked out of my loft window in downtown Los Angeles and realized I lived on Traction Avenue, right across from that same neon museum.
Moving to California in my twenties, I promised my family in Pennsylvania that there was no way I would ever move back to the cold in the east. As I write this today, I have lived in the cold for the past 13 years, only 3 hours from where I grew up.
Shopping for a faucet, I kept pointing out the kind I never wanted to get. Today, that is the faucet I own, and I love it!
It became obvious that it is best not to say, “I’ll never do that, “because those boxes of thinking were going to be discarded whether I liked it or not.