News item: Beyoncé and Jay-Z purchase a $200 million Malibu mansion.
Even if you had all the money in the world, wouldn’t $20 million be sufficient? Think of how much good the remaining $180 million could do for the less-fortunate. I mean, how many bedrooms and bathrooms can a person use?
If you feel envy of their new digs, remember this: Beyoncé and Jay-Z still live in a box just like you and I.
Oh, it’s quite an enormous box to be sure—40,000 square feet. But it’s still a confined interior space whether it’s a seaside castle or a 120-square foot studio apartment—it remains a box.
We spend most of our lives living in confined boxed spaces. From womb to crib to bed to house to car to classroom to office to hospital to coffin.
Boxes are how we store things including ourselves.
Four walls, a ceiling, a floor—basic design of human life.
People spend huge amounts of disposable income filling in that space, placing art on walls, hanging lights from ceilings, laying rugs on floors,
Think of all the boxes that you now have in your home. A house is a box divided into smaller boxes. The bedrooms, the bathrooms, the closets, the dressers, the shower stall, the appliances. Years ago, a refrigerator was referred to as the icebox.
Inside the closets are boxes of shoes, memorabilia, photos.
Then we take boxes from inside the house and put them in a larger box called a garage.
You see, our lives are mostly lived in confined spaces. People think prison is confining when in reality we are all confined.
That’s why whenever I go on a trip, I favor visiting outdoor natural settings, rural areas over cities. National parks in particular have no walls and definitely no ceilings—unless you count the sky and the stars.
These treasured, preserved areas remind us of how insignificant and finite our lives are. Human history makes up such an infinitesimal speck in the earth’s existence.
It is humbling to visit Zion National Park and admire mountains that are millions of years old.
Wherever you live, pay attention to the topography that was there before you were born and will remain after you are long gone. We are but brief visitors to this blessed planet.
If more people would keep this reality in mind, environmental issues such as global warming and climate change could more effectively be tackled. But there’s something in the human mind that prevents people from thinking beyond their lifespan. Parents often understand this concept whenever they talk about leaving the planet better off for their children and their grandchildren.
When people talk about personal freedoms, they are overlooking the one that is so obvious, we take it for granted: the freedom to go outside every day, watching the clouds, feeling the cool air, hearing the birds. Because these things are always there, it’s as if they are never there, an invisible sensory experience waiting to be savored.
For what matters most is when we walk outside the box. And that’s something celebrities like Beyoncé and Jay-Z can’t easily do.