Living 'Outside The Box' Away From The Comfort Zone

Being different is what makes us tick.

Animal species take millions of years to evolve, but people can do this in just seconds. An idea, a thought, put into action while engaging others in the dream, can change our lives permanently for better or worse.

The world is full of people ‘thinking outside the box’, but too often their ideas and dreams are pushed aside in favour of more conservative plans.

But it’s not the conservative among us we need to celebrate.

Swedish artist Mikael Genberg spends his eventful life turning every day businesses and services into extreme adventures.

He opened a coffee shop in Sweden because Swedes, he says, love their coffee. There’s nothing special about a café, especially one that only has room for eight guests. Except this one has a set of ladders going five metres into the air and coffee drinkers have to scale these ladders, take their precarious seat and winch their drink up in a basket.

The place is always full because, as Mikael well knows, people love doing things differently.

We have become creatures of extreme comfort, and getting out of this comfort in every way possible must be our priority. Our responsibility.

Comfort zones slowly kill us. Mikael also designed a unique guesthouse, also in Sweden.

Utter Inn is a small red house sitting in the middle of a lake. During the day you can sit back, drink coffee on the veranda, enjoy life and the view and scoff whatever is at hand.

At night you go downstairs, five metres, to a lovely bedroom deep under the water. All the walls are made of glass, so in effect you are spending the night inside an aquarium, except the water and all its inhabitants are on the outside.

This is what creative people do. They take things we see as normal and move them around, turn them inside out, tip them over, rearrange the concept and re-introduce it to a world of people hanging out for something different to experience.

Another of Mikael’s creations is the Woodpecker Hotel, in city park, Vasaparken, Sweden. 13 metres up an old oak tree, the hotel has room for one person, two if they share the bed, and has a bedroom, kitchen, veranda with hammock and a toilet. Meals are served winched up in a basket and for adults who were all children once, this is the dream tree house.

And maybe that’s what this is all about. As children we play, we create, dream, imagine and our real and imaginary worlds blend together so often we cant set them apart.

And why should we? Everything created by humankind we see around us was someone’s outlandish idea once, for which the dreamer got ridiculed and dismissed by the conservative masses that had forgotten how to dream.

In Vanuatu they have built the first underwater post office. Why? Who cares.

Four divers staff the facility in shifts, and a waterproof postcard has been created so customers can visit and post their correspondence underwater. This egg shaped ‘building’ attracts us because who wouldn’t want to post their holiday postcard from an underwater post office.

On the same island they have also erected a post box on the rim of a bubbling, smoking, lava filed, ash spewing live volcano, and have designed the postcards to look singed and burnt.

Why? Again, I seriously don’t care.

We find ourselves doing the same things every day. Watching the same TV shows on a weekly basis, buying the same junk food, electrical goods and trinkets as everyone else. Supermarkets dictate the brands of food and household goods we use and life, is comfortable.

But still we’re bored, discontented; we look for more and never get satisfied when we find it. We could live with far less, but we strive to get even more.

Half our lives are spent collecting ‘stuff’, and the second half either trying to get rid of the ‘stuff’ we collected or hanging onto it until the bitter end.

‘Thinking outside the box’ is something we can all do if we allow ourselves to dream.

Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

I am a children’s author, and I run workshops in schools around Australia in creative writing, advanced memory techniques and self-esteem. At www.chocmint.com you will find our creative online studio, and if you contact me there I will forward you the meaning of life. Seriously. The secret of living the life you love. You’ll take it on board and use it, or you wont. But subscribe to chocmint, and I’ll give it to you with no catch.

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