LITTLE BOX OF CRAYONS

Box Of Crayons
"I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate -- it's apathy. It's not giving a damn."Leo Buscaglia "
Little Box Of Crayons
Relationships are complicated. They are heavy and cumbersome, and without the full understanding of them, often become far too much to deal with effectively. Everything is related to something else and it is almost impossible to gain any kind of stable footing when it feels like you are trying to stop a giant snowball from running you over as it travels down the mountain. No place to put your foot is bad enough, but most people are put into a position that they have no real balance for their own bodies, let alone any kind of load. And many relationships, or certain people within them LIKE, that. Because without your own personal balance and footing, how can you be expected to be able to accomplish anything? There is no load that can be applied to yourself if every time you do you feel as though you will topple over. And so they let go of the load. And unfortunately, when we do, we allow someone else to take control of it. Usually however they see fit because OBVIOUSLY we are not in the position to have any say in it whatsoever if we can't even keep ourselves upright.
This sets up a pattern. It sets in motion a continual cycle of inability that slowly erodes what it is in ourselves by believing we are incapable of making the decisions. And by the time we realize it, we often find that we have been relegated to the backseat of a relationship. Not by what we can or can't do, but by our own belief that we simply can not do it on our own. We NEED that other person to do it for us, and without them, we will fail. Period.
Well I felt this way for a very long time. And many of the people in my life have resigned themselves to the same fate. Always on the defensive, always in a place they don't truly wish to be, and always feeling as though they have no control whatsoever. We have looked at our relationships as a weight that we can not hold on our own, and we rely on the other to hold it for us. How they hold it is no longer up to us. What it is that keeps it there is also not up to us. It is THEIR relationship and our inability of us not to do what they expect ensures that we simply cannot function without it.
I think that is bullshit. I think that everything in a relationship can be pared away until it is no larger than a box of Crayola crayons. This box is what we put the attributes of the other person in our relationship. And how we view this box is directly related to our success within it. Now even though it is a box of crayons, we know that it is heavy. It has a weight to it that we can not understand and because we can't we often just think of it as a whole thing. It is an all or nothing concept. And the less we think about it, the better off we will be.
Now right now people are looking at what it is that they feel, or think they feel, so very much like a box of crayons.
So go and get a 64 box of Crayola crayons and let's put a little visible reality to what it is that many of you are trying to sort out of the person you feel you love. Because one of the problems so many of my friends seem to be having is that while it is very easy to say that they "love" someone, for whatever the reasons, they really have absolutely no idea what that word means . Some have the idea correctly in their head, but don't need it. Still others had it at one point and lost it along the way and simply added what it was to their lives they felt justified it. Like Christmas decorations on a dead tree. And then there are those who never had it at all. They thought they did, but, by and large, simply don't understand what it equates to at all. It's like having all of the pieces of a puzzle but not having the box to see what the picture was supposed to look like or the energy to do it. All they care to account for is that they do , indeed, have 500 pieces like they were supposed to have.
People are much like crayons. Not the crayons themselves, but the box that contains them. And the crayons inside are all of the components of what our relationship with them is defined by. Almost everyone looks at the box itself and assumes that that is what will be gained or lost. And that's much like believing that a child cries for the box the crayons come in when he doesn't get a box of crayons. What they WANT is the crayons. The BOX is irrelevant. Well our relationships are like a box of crayons, and,just as with real crayons, the box is irrelevant.
So before you read this, go and get a box of crayons. Spend a few minutes SERIOUSLY looking at what it is that so many of you claim to be hanging on to and really LOOK at it without it being all clouded over by everything else that gets thrown into your faces when you try to analyze a situation. Go get a box of CRAYONS!!!!
Instead of looking at these crayons as colors, take the crayons out of the box and right on the side of each one, what it is that you feel the other person has. The parts that you simply believe are there and are a part of the relationship as you see it. And don't skimp on them, either. This is exactly what your mind sees as inherent to your relationship with this person. At the same time, don't add in things that are associated with others. You are using these crayons as a physical representation of what it is you feel is necessary or vital to your particular relationship. They are concrete things in the world that normally have abstract associations. I did the same thing and I labeled a few like this:
Sense Of Humor
Compassion
Honesty
Trust
Reliability
Intimacy
Respect
Self respect
Comfort
Security
Manners
The ability to provide
Safety
Now you can go along and write as many labels on to crayons as you feel are necessary, but be HONEST with what it is that you think makes this relationship. A great many of you will do exactly what you have told me in countless conversations about your relationships. That you don't really KNOW what to put on the crayons. THAT is a very good indicator that you really didn't understand what it was you got yourself into in the first place. A few others will be able to quickly write an entire box of what it is they might lose, but watch what happens later on in this little technicolor experiment. When you are done, put all of the crayons back into the box, close it, and put it onto the table in front of you. Take EVERYTHING else off of the table and seriously set your mind to thinking completely about this ONE THING. You've spent enough time wandering around telling yourself you don't know. Spend a few minutes telling yourself what you DO know.
What you are looking at right now is NOT a box of crayons. It is everything that you associate with the person you are doing this exercise about. It is the whole package as you see it, feel it and most importantly, understand it.
This is your relationship that you see. It is everything that is there. If you were honest about what you wrote on the sides of the crayons, you will get an honest result. If you didn't really find that many things to write on the crayons, you are already getting an understanding of what is wrong. Most people spend their entire lives looking at the box from the outside. They say that the box is the person that they love, but never really get the chance to analyze the box as a collection of parts. To lose it, for whatever reason, is simply not possible for them to comprehend because they relate the entire box and all of its contents as the entire person. And the loss of the box is simply too much to deal with....so they don't.
Let's just take one crayon out of the box. Just for the sake of argument, we pull out the crayon labeled "Sense of Humor". Now MOST people look at this crayon and they assume that the whole crayon as being intrinsic to THAT person. That it represents HIS or HER sense of humor But it isn't. Because everyone has a sense of humor to some degree or another. So the majority of that crayon is what is in everyone and not just them. It is what that person brings personally to the sense of humor. That's what makes the uniqueness into it. But by and large, MOST of that crayon is just like everyone Else's. So do not attribute that whole crayon to that person specifically. It is their own spin they put on the crayon( or the quality it represents), and saying it is all or nothing is not possible. So ask yourself how much of this one crayon is in everyone, and then break off the piece that you feel is inherent ONLY TO THEM. That little piece is what you can say belongs back inside the box. The rest of the crayon is a quality everyone has, and can not, or should not, be attributed to themselves when all they do is add to it. Doing that is much like saying that without this person's sense of humor, there is no humor at all anywhere else. And feeling that only this person is capable of it creates the illusion where you justify the whole based on the part. You can only love the individual part, and they are not allowed to use the rest as a justification for themselves, and YOU can not use what belongs to everyone as a way to tip the scales.
Now some crayons are something that only they can do, but very often we assume that only they can do it because it has never been able to be seen in someone else. By the same token, you may find that there is very little at all of a quality with certain crayons and you have simply been attributing them to the whole because you had no way of disassociating it from the others. This is a point of awareness that should be VERY important to your overall perception of the qualities and the relationship. When you find a crayon(quality) that you expected to be there, and has almost no substance in it of themselves, take careful not of the weight of that crayon. Because that is weight you associated with the weight of the relationship that simply IS NOT THERE. The ONLY reason it is there is because YOU attributed it to the box.
Go through the whole box, and honestly break the crayons into the lengths you feel they themselves have a right to. No more, and no less. Look at the compassion, look at the communication, look at the honesty, and begin to realize what is there and what is not. Take those other pieces that are not part of them OUT OF THE BOX. They do not belong there, they are not theirs to use, and they unfairly add weight to the whole box. Our failure to see that we have attributed what is in everyone to a specific person, makes it possible for another person to keep a relationship just as it is by YOUR belief that it should be there, and not whether it is there at all. It's dead weight, and all to their advantage if you can't see that you put it there rather than it being there to begin with.
I did exactly this when I was confronted with the situation or the understanding that I was saying I loved someone, believed in the word, but had absolutely no idea of what I was basing it on. My marriage had collapsed and I was blaming myself. It was MY fault it wasn't working, and I was making the box of crayons the end argument. I was looking at the whole box and NEVER got to a point where I could objectively look into it and separate the wheat from the chaff. And when I was finally left completely alone I looked into the box as a way of trying to understand it. When I stopped attributing all of these qualities as the measure of my relationship, and truly LOOKED at what was left of her, there was far less than I thought. The ONLY reason this was staying where it was, was because I was the one who had been led to believe that there was more to her than there was by being unable to open the box.
This made me come to a very startling revelation. That I was sitting here assuming that I had a relationship. That I was justifying staying, and enduring, and mostly exerting effort, with very little substance to it at all. And that after I was finished, found that I was holding a very heavy box of chaff with very little wheat in it at all.
We are all so very good at saying what someone IS without ever allowing ourselves to say what they ARE NOT. We spend the lions effort feeling that we are the ones with the emotional failings and that we are the ones who should feel like absolute fools for even considering an alternative. But it is us that fails to realize that it is in THEIR best interest to allow us to believe that the incredible weight of the relationship is based on our PERCEPTION of its weight. The whole argument falls apart when we sit down by ourselves, LOOK at it, and find that we have attributed a large measure of weight in a relationship to them alone, without ever recognizing that ANYONE has that weight.
Take that box of crayons now, and give it a shake. Does it feel far less substantial when you realize that there really isn't as much there as you thought? And to think. All this time we were led to believe that it was so much more.