A Metaphor About Winging It
I was a doodler in school, just not a very good one. But I had my go-to characters that I'd like to draw. One of which, as you may have guessed now, was a "moose in a box". It came about by me realizing one day that I could draw a pretty good cartoon moose head, but that is about as far as my drawing skills/patience with drawing would take me. So as a short cut, I simply drew part of his body and then put the rest of my beloved character in a box. Then I would add a label to the box to point out that my drawing was indeed a "moose in a box" in case there was any question.So reflecting on its origins, this moose in a box kind of represents how we sometimes do things in life. We start with using the skills and knowledge that we have already attained, but by all means we are not experts on every facet of what we are trying to accomplish. So when it comes to moving forward, in both completing the picture of a moose or in life in general, we have a choice for how much time and effort we want to spend. I choose to not take the time to figure out how to draw the perfect full and complete moose, but I still ended up with something really interesting and valuable, at least to me. And so too in life I feel it's valuable to not try to control and become experts on every facet of what we're doing/planning. It's ok to wing-it, to take that short cut, or to leave things a bit more open ended because where that can take you can also be pretty cool.
The Box Metaphor
Katie and I don't always follow the status quo. You could even say we're the type that tend to "think outside the box". But at the same time, we'd argue that we're not doing anything that has not already been done before in some way or another. The pieces are all there, we just may use some others tend to ignore or arrange them a bit differently.For example, instead of following the usual path for our wedding, what we valued did not line up with what seemed to be the average standard template for weddings. That's not to say we think those weddings are dumb or anything. Quite the contrary, we've been very blessed to attend and even be apart of many standard weddings for friends and family that we've thoroughly enjoyed. But we also saw how much stress such an event can potentially cause, both financially and psychologically, and it just didn't seem worth it to us. So after some deliberation, we instead did a much more intimate ceremony with just our family and focused most of our wedding weekend on letting them live life with us instead of stressing about wedding details because that time of community, fellowship, and support was what was most important to us. It wasn't the most novel execution of a wedding in the world. Lots of people look at the stresses of weddings and decide to elope or slim down in one way or another. But we're definitely among those willing to ask the question "why are we doing this?" and make life decisions that take us down less predictable paths as a result of trying to answer that question.
So we don't see ourselves so much as the type that are truly "thinking outside of the box". But perhaps we do view the box of life a bit differently the some others do. For us we have found that there is a moose in the box. Or there is a least a moose in our box. Maybe we put it there. Or maybe it was always there. Maybe everyone has moose in their box too, but they just don't recognize that it's there. Either way we know and see that there is a moose in the box and are excited about the possibilities that that brings.
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You may have noticed that this blog post is tagged with the label Moose In A Box. If we write any future posts that relate to these metaphors about living life just a bit differently that we talked about in this post, we'll try to add the same label.