Is It Possible to Live Outside the Box?
It Takes a Lot of Self Awareness
I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I have a rather low opinion of people. I once had a friend tell me that they sympathized with humanity but didn’t much care for people.
I get that!
I can examine the plight of humans at large and be moved to tears. I hate that there’s so much suffering in the world. Hate it! I’ve never been able to accept that it’s just the way things are on this planet. I don’t view suffering as something noble that makes us stronger but rather as an unavoidable part of life that breaks us.
We’re all broken.
Yet, I tend to avoid people. Sure, I have friends and family that I care about, but they also wear me out. Why? Because people are often the cause of many of their own problems. I’m no different, mind you. It’s hard to find a balance in life. Furthermore, human relationships are complicated and riddled with problems.
Life is composed of a series of problems that need solving if we want to survive, one right after another.
Once in while if we’re lucky, we experience a feel-good moment. If we fail to enjoy it, there’s no guarantee that we’ll get another.
Lots of people spoil their own feel-good moments.
It’s shocking the number of people who choose to go through life drunk, high, desensitized, and in an altered state of consciousness. Even the rich and famous sometimes choose to experience sex, money, private jets, adoring fans, mansions, cars through a haze of dope, drugs and alcohol.
So much for the idea that money can make us happy.
Parenting is substandard in a high percentage of homes. Children often come into this world only to encounter broken parents who are either preoccupied with their own problems or downright mean and cruel, making it appear that if you were given a set of merely neglectful parents, you lucked out.
And then there’s all the other stuff that is completely out of our control.
Endless wars, violent weather, droughts, pestilence, disease, hideous accidents — must I go on? Deep down inside I think most humans are traumatized to a greater or lesser degree.
Fortunately, our brains shield most of us from completely going down the rabbit hole depressed, anxious, and afraid.
We seem to be wired to see only what we want to see. Our big brains shield us from total terror by incorporating little, short circuits like wishful thinking, denial, cognitive dissonance, and avoidance.
But there’s a downside to that as well, unfortunately.
Yes, it gives us a break from night sweats and lucid daydreams, but it also contributes to a very great extent to the tendency to create our own special brand of problems.
I’ve often said that if there’s an easy way to do something or a hard way, humans opt for the hard way most of the time.
So, a woman is in an unhappy marriage. She has a baby to save the marriage. Of course, that doesn’t work. In fact, now her life is even more complicated. Eventually, she leaves her husband. However, within the shortest of time periods she hooks up with another man, one who bears an odd resemblance to the previous bloke. She gives him a baby. She’s still unhappy, but now she feels stuck. She has two kids, and her income isn’t big enough to support them on her own.
She spends the next years crying to her friends about how unhappy she is, much to their chagrin.
The reverse of the above story can be just as true, too. Men are not immune to choosing partners that drag them through divorces while taking their children to live with Uncle Pete. It seems like dysfunctional relationships are often at the crux of our self-made problems. As though life isn’t hard enough with pestilence and hurricanes, disease and droughts, tooth aches and mortgages, bad bosses and debt.
There’s no end to our poor judgement and selfish endeavors.
Humans can live deeply in debt but as soon as they begin to free themselves just a wee bit, they run out and purchase a car they can’t afford. It’s common for Americans to live their entire lives buried in debt. Never able to have a good night’s sleep because they’re afraid creditors will appear on their doorstep the next morning.
We use and abuse our freshwater resources, pollute our air, pick fights, drink and drive, eat the food that gives us heartburn, have unprotected sex, start wars, and beat our own kids.
What the bloody hell?
Our saving grace is that sometimes some people also choose to do something noble and unselfish. They aren’t always appreciated, but the world would be a much starker place without these altruistic contributions.
When I was a kid, I watched my parents fighting. They fought a lot.
I’d end up wondering why they whipped my siblings for fighting but they couldn’t solve their own problems without having a knock down drag out. It slowly began to dawn upon me that if I wanted a different life than the one they had, I was going to have to figure it out for myself.
My parents weren’t very good role models.
Surprisingly, I think that a huge number of children are just like I was as a child. Their observations provide just enough insight into what they didn’t want when they grew up but few hints about any alternative lifestyles that might be available to them.
I floundered for some time after I left home.
I knew I wanted something vastly different, but I had zero role models. Things changed for me when I decided to go to college. I was married and living in a backwards little hick town in the Midwest. There was literally no one to help me figure things out. No one. Until I took a music appreciation night course and met Patricia Staebler. She was a white-haired older woman, elegantly dressed, who played the viola, talked about the riches of Beethoven, and spoke French. She’d lived in France for a while where she sent her two children to Montessori schools.
For some reason, she saw me. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever felt seen.
She saw a bright girl with a creative spirit and the desire to get out of a dead-end town. To my surprise, I saw a pathway for the first time in my life. I was 20 at the time, a young mother, and trying desperately to define my personal preferences.
Unfortunately, not everyone has a Patricia Staebler in their life.
Many go on to repeat the mistakes of their parents. I’m not saying for one minute that I never made mistakes, because I did. Plenty of mistakes. But without a role model, someone who represented the bigger world beyond the provincial one that I’d been born into, I , too, might have never found a pathway toward something new and different. It’s a strange old world and so much of it is left up to chance and the luck of the draw.
How can we raise our children to understand that there’s a zillion different ways to live a life? I don’t know. Yet, it would be glorious if we could.
I understand the power of any culture that humans inherit through the sheer lottery of birth to totally influence how we live our lives. Cultural expectations are far better at controlling human behaviors than laws will ever be. People do what’s expected without even questioning. They think it’s not only normal but often the only way to do things. I also understand that if we have no idea that we have options, we tend to do things the way everyone else does them.
Yet, I honestly believe that children come into this world curious and without preconceived notions.
Anything seems possible. Anything! But by the time we’re young adults, most of us have subconsciously agreed to live a variation of the same day over and over again. You know — date, work, marry, have children, buy a house, work some more, and then die. To not do the things on that list would make us stick out like a sore thumb. Furthermore, we often do those seven culturally required things in much the same way as our parents did them. No matter how miserable our parents were, no matter how miserable they made us, in the end, we can easily become them.
All of this leaves me with one burning question.
What if we weren’t put in a box when we were born? How would life be for us then? Would we create fewer problems for ourselves? Would our innate spirit of creativity and natural curiosity deliver far more interesting lives, even produce solutions to lots of problems that we pass down from one generation to the next?
I wonder.
Teresa is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
