Boxes

Boxes, our lives are comprised of them. This thought came to me as I was packing up my life (yet again) so that I could transport it 600 miles and unpack it
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At first, I chalked it up to the plight of a college student--or the age of transition--but then it occurred to me that we live our whole lives in boxes.

We have the box of childhood, with the smaller boxes of school, chores, obeying parents, and play dates.

We have the box of adolescents, where our boxes seem more confining and we long to escape.

We have the box of the transition age (18--'til we settle down). This box is filled with literal boxes, a constant packing up and moving.

Then the rest of the boxes... I won't go into these, as I haven't experienced them--yet.

We also tend to put God in a box. It's human nature; our brains need things to be compartmentalized in order to be understood. However, God transcends boxes, especially boxes of human making.

Melville used wall symbolism in his writing, but life is more than walls, it's boxes. We tend to think of boxes as a negative thing, however, in most things they just symbolize the phases of life. The one thing we must not box up and neatly label, though, is God. God, in His splendor, cannot be shrunk to fit a finite box of human origin.