In and out of boxes we all go. In the beginning, we’re pushed into them, nudged here, shoved there. But later on, we learn to step into the limits of our own choosing.

I’ve been considering the options as to how I want to live. I want to try drugs, party, drink, live. I want to be humble and well behaved. I’ve been told there very well may exist the balance of both. But balance is everything I don’t want. I crave the extreme, my invitation to the unnecessary and beautiful.

So Buddha says, “all you are results from your thoughts.” My thoughts are scattered, connected, messy, one often breaching the other. So am I a walking collection of scattered ideas and hopeless impulses? It seems so.

I’ve never really been able to keep a diary and sometimes I wonder why. In the beginning, I just didn’t want my mother to read it. But years later I am assured absolute confidentiality, just me and a notebook. And yet that fear remains that if I, even for a moment, let go and release the thoughts I keep so deeply, there will be catastrophic consequences. A pretty irrational thought.  What’s the worst that can happen?

Sometimes I like to think of myself as a symphony composed by the influences of everyone I’ve ever and never met.  You and I, he and she, us and them: not separated but a party of souls basking in each other’s divinity. At other times, I don’t like to think of myself very much at all.

If a fish has known only a four by two tank all its life, could there be at the very core of this creature the innate desire to roam the oceans for which it was created? Born into imposed limits, could we even know we’re being restrained?

Where do your limits begin? In and out of boxes we all go.