Thinking outside the box

I woke up this morning thinking about the expression, "Thinking outside the box", and wondered where it came from.

The origin is largely credited to the nine dots puzzle,  where the solution lies in seeing beyond the edges of the square implied by the nine dots.

Nine dots puzzle

That got me to thinking about why we tend to think in boxes, why we tend to follow patterns, and why we retry familiar solutions even when we are fairly certain they will not correct the problems we have.

Why is it so difficult to break out of the box?

I think there are a number of reasons, the first of which is that we don't recognize the box we are in.

Most of us do the same things over and over again.  We eat the same foods, go to the same stores, cheer for the same teams, drive the same route to work.

The more we repeat a behavior, the stronger those pathways in our brains become.  And the stronger the pathways, the harder it is to get out of those pathways.

The best way to prevent getting boxed in is to break your patterns.

Go to a different grocery store, or shop backwards in your usual store.  Take a different route somewhere.  Try a new food, or a different restaurant.  Try a new brain teaser, puzzle or game.

The more you willingly expose yourself to new experiences, the more new pathways your brain has to make.  Write.   Honestly, since starting this blog, and starting to put the stories in my imagination on paper, I'm seeing things in entirely different ways.

There is always more than one right answer.  The rightness or wrongness of answers is so very dependant on other changing variables.  The more we open ourselves up to new things, new experiences, new people, new locations, the easier it gets to see that there is always more than one right answer.

When we stop looking for right answers, and start looking for the best available answer, we've gone a long way to breaking down the walls of the box.

Creativity is elusive when you are stuck in the familiar.   Providing yourself with the spark of something different can unleash an avalanche of creativity.  And that can make the world a very fun and exciting place indeed.