Welcome to Paradigm O

No matter where I go, I can’t help but notice, everywhere I look, people living from box to box.

Or going box to box selling new boxes, like set-top boxes or recipe-meal boxes. Or ordering food from a pocket-sized-box, food delivered in several boxes.

Or maybe a box will appear in 3 weeks to satisfy a 3-week old urge to hold some new item you might use.

All conveniently boxed up in a nice package. This is life, right?

Very rarely is anything circular, yet it feels like everything should be.

Everything could be.

Cyclical, circular, distributed, like the cycles of the Earth.

But we’ve become so boxed in, our vision is skewed.

We’re box-eyed and hypnotised, convinced that creating endless boxes made up of that which we extract from our finely balanced cyclical system will stand tall as the monument to herald our glory. Look at what humanity did.

Except, box-eyed and hypnotised, we can’t even see the massive pile-up that’s towering over us, looming as it’s all about to collapse down on us.

Or maybe we can. But its like a giant game of Jenga that nobody’s won or lost yet, and its so fragile now that no one’s even game enough to move, so for the most part it sits there like the elephant in the room. We all know its there.

But we keep ourselves pacified by only looking as far as the walls of our box. Which ever one we’re in.
Whether in transit.
The office.
The cubicle.
The toilet.
The shower.
The screen.

Everywhere you spend your time.

We’re so good at spending time boxed in that we’ve forgotten how to look outside the box.

“Break out of the box! This is not the way humanity lived for thousands of years.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man

We have lost that 360° perspective that life is all about.

No wonder we’re failing.
No wonder we’re depressed and unfulfilled.
No wonder we haven’t saved ourselves yet.

The answers are outside of the boxes, and transit ways and pathways.
We get to them by looking beyond the walls, beyond the window-dressings, beyond the billboards. Putting down the screen.

When was the last time you looked around at the world outside and took in every detail 360° around you?

When was the last time you really did that and let it sink in just how alive you are in this moment?

Or how alive everyone around you is, and how amazing it is that we’re somehow even here on this incredible life supporting oasis of a planet?

A planet that appears to be floating in an apparent abyss.

An abyss that looks like a beautiful shade of blue awash with moving figures of cloud and a bright orb of light.

Or at other times a star encrusted blanket over a dark black illuminated by a moon that shows only part of its face in an endless cycle.

Dancing with the tides of the ocean that lap the shore of the land we are so lucky to have in this delicately balanced system.

When was the last time you shared moments with a circle of others, who, whether you have met many times or never, share this crazy and incomprehensible reality with you.

When was the last time you went somewhere, and at every moment, felt you had the freedom to move in any direction 360° from where you are standing, and the time to do that again and again…

Until you end up lost.

Maybe you have found this out.

Maybe you haven’t.

If you haven’t, can I make a suggestion?

Go get lost, somewhere that might be just moments away from the path you find yourself taking everyday on autopilot. The one you know because you take it everyday. Go, now.

I did this once. I’m not sure why, but something cried out from the depths of inside myself:

“Break free”

“From what?” I asked it.

“From yourself” it answered.

Welcome to Paradigm O.