Tiny Boxes

Tucson, Arizona

We spend our shockingly short period of time here on Planet Earth sitting inside of tiny boxes. We stare at the walls, then scurry off to another little box and stare at a glowing rectangle for ten hours. Then, we get back inside our box on wheels to return to the box we left that morning.

To distract ourselves from the miserableness of this daily existence, Americans spend countless hours gazing upon the massive black box affixed to the inside of our tiny box. This flat, black box is the focal point of the tiny boxes that we spend our lives inside. This box on the wall is our window to the outside world. It is our portal through which we look beyond our own tiny box and see the wonders of the natural world, experience the beauty that surrounds us. We are mentally transported for hours on end to spectacular places, both real and imaginary, in such a transcendent way that we forget we're actually sitting inside of a tiny box in the middle of Plainville, Kansas, or Boring, Oregon.

The boredom, drudgery, and depression of spending our lives inside of these tiny boxes, day in and day out, year in and year out, is too much for our souls to bear, so as the years roll on, we spend more and more of our time staring at our window to the universe, imagining that we are someplace else.

Or, if we are a little more ambitious, we play America's favorite game: get a bigger box than your friends and family.

Indeed, it often feels like our entire lives are spent going to the different boxes with the glowing white screens in order to increase the size of our starting and ending box for the day. Interestingly, increasing the size of the middle-of-the-day box with the glowing screen correlates to an increase in the size of the beginning- and end-of-day box.

Once we achieve a box of sufficient size to intimidate our family and friends, we take a break... until the neighbor builds an even bigger box.

But the entire time that we're wasting our lives to get a bigger and bigger box, we forget that all big boxes are simply made up of a collection of tiny boxes put together. And, obvious though it might appear, we can still only inhabit one tiny box at a time.

What we miss in all of our obsession with tiny boxes and big, black windows is that each and every box has a hole in the side that we can choose to walk through, leaving the boxes behind.