Living Outside the Box

Many of us are stuck in a box. Raised to go to school to get a career, have a family, and get a house. With doors locked at night, a dog or security system, maybe even a gate, we sleep safely in our box. Self-reliance is our religion, and any human need can be satisfied at the right price. Need someone to watch the kid, hire a babysitter. Money means independence.

In our box, we are often isolated, lonely, and hungry for community. Life is lonely inside the box. I don’t really fit in the box, and I have plenty of friends who do not fit into the box. Many people, for a variety of reasons, will never achieve the box. Some folks have disabilities. Others suffer mental illness. The path of a career is open to fewer and fewer people, and we suffer from poverty of wealth and spirit. We are in the grip of addiction which cannot be contained by a box. Institutional racism and discrimination, narrowly define who is welcome in our country and community. It is not safe for an undocumented teenager to drive, or an African American to wear a hoody. We narrowly define who can fall in love and how we can live together. Our economic and cultural inequalities, our inability to share our stuff or include our neighbors, mean that a huge part of our community cannot live inside the box. Whether we are homeless, living in foreclosed homes, undocumented teenagers, suffer from untreated mental illness, join gangs, return home from prison, or want to marry our gay life partner – we are not at home in our own neighborhood. We are living outside the box.

 

 The solution to this problem is not to put everyone in a box.

Upon close inspection, life in the box is boring, isolated, and narrow. Life out of the box, is scary, dangerous, and usually ends up in jail at some point. Jail is where we put people who don’t fit in the box. And with police in our schools, we are starting the pipeline from school to jail at younger and younger ages.

There has to be something more than being stuck in the box, and something less than profound homelessness. The answer is healthy community: integrated, inclusive, diverse, complicated, messy community. There are people all around refusing to live alone in boxes, and who are experimenting with open, loving, inclusive community. A healthy community nurtures individuals on their path of being fully who they are, while at the same time robbing individuals of the delusion of self-reliance. We all belong to each other, and find the fulfillment of our beautiful uniqueness in the inter-dependent garden of our lives. Let’s get rid of the box, and live in the garden, all together.