Thinking Inside the Box: My Piece of Your Professional Development

The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates

Boxes vary widely in shape and construction, but they tend to all serve the same purposes. They define important boundaries, protect what’s inside, and help us organize our lives. Some are big and bulky; others tiny and delicate. We use them to carry around things ranging from the irreplaceable, a Stradivarius for instance, to outright junk. Those of us who have moved lately know that there seems to be a box for everything and every purpose. As a matter of fact those with more stuff than can be rightly used go find an even bigger, more substantial box to store things like that extra ironing board, old baseball cards, and worn-out tools. For a more complete list of items we lock up in these big boxes, watch an episode of Storage Wars. As the winning bidder finds out, occasionally there are treasures that have been left behind or stored away and forgotten, in which case the bidder loads the valuable things in a box truck and takes them to a big box building to sort through and sell. The buyers in turn, find smaller boxes to put their new items in and the cycle begins anew. However, all of it eventually ends up in a bigger box, even us.

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