Most of us love boxes, to me they invoke excitement. A surprise hiding behind the packaging. When I receive an Amazon box I get so excited to open it up immediately, even though I know what is in it because ordered it, LOL. To have it in my hands, feeling the texture of the box, the weight of it invokes a childlike excitement of Christmas morning and I can’t wait to open it. There are other kinds of boxes we love too. The ones that help us make sense of the world.

As little tikes we learned about our world by categorizing things. Hot things were one box, cold things another, toys you could play with went in one mental box while mommy’s and daddy’s toys went in another mental box. It is how we made sense of things and learned. These boxes were a really helpful tool for our development.

Some tools are only helpful for certain things. Like I would never use a screw driver to drive a nail into a piece of wood. Hammers are a much more useful for those tasks. The same goes for filtering our world through boxes as adults.

The placing things and people into boxes way of thinking doesn’t serve us very well. As we age the world gets more and more complex, what was once black and white we begin to discover is grey. From personal experience that is a very hard transition to make, from black and white thinking Wrong vs Right to grey and maybe it is right and maybe it is not. I discovered over the years the more of a grey thinker I became the happier I became as well.

When we transition to dare I say “Open minded” thinking we get to enjoy NOT sitting in that judge’s chair quite as long. Black and white thinking sits our little hot booties in a place of judgement, constantly evaluating which box to put people and things in; the Right box or the Wrong box. People, that is flippin exhausting! Especially when you are a grown ass adult working full-time, have a life partner, caring for kiddos or fur babies and trying to squeeze some other activities in.

In high school it was easier function from this perspective, just like it is easier to get pregnant in high school, why? We had A LOT more free time, less stress therefore a hell of a lot more energy. Adulthood as we all know takes less sleep and a lot more energy to make it through the days. With less time and energy I have tried to make things easier, more efficient for myself. Why do things the hard way when we can work smarter not harder!

So I made the decision I was going to sledge hammer those pretty little boxes I was putting the world in. No more instantly putting people in a box, no more quickly judging something as right or wrong, and no more thinking my truth narrative was the ONLY truth there is. This was not easy and it did not happen overnight. It was a slow evolution that I went kicking and screaming into, because much of my thinking was imparted to me by my family, my culture, my religion, you know those things that are heavily ingrained in us.

I don’t regret choosing to take this journey though. I wouldn’t be who I am today, someone I like so much more. The non-box perspective allows me to explore people and the multi-facets that make them up. To see some of you from fresh eyes, to allow you out of the box I put you in, in high school. The Amber, Tarran, and Thomas of high school are not the same people today they were almost 20 years ago, neither am I. Nor am I the same big sister or daughter I was 20+ years ago. We all change and evolve each year, thus the reason the pretty little boxes don’t serve us well.

Boxes take work to maintain and are stagnant, we live in an ever changing world and one that demands we be efficient with our time because we don’t have much of it.

Here is your challenge: today every time you see a human face ask yourself what box did you instantly put that person in? When you feel yourself say that is wrong/I don’t agree with what someone posted, said, texted, tweeted, or did imagine yourself sitting on the judges seat and then imagine them sitting on one judging you. It quickly begin’s to wake us up to all this sub-conscious judgment.

We all want grace and we all want people to understand and know us, to know the full story not just the snippet we are being judged by. To allow others to be who they are and accept the idea that their truth maybe different from yours and that is beautiful. This allows us to accept our beautiful selves and free ourselves from the boxes we have allowed others or ourselves to place us in.

Onward toward freedom my friends!