At first, it felt like both a personal triumph and a magical gift from the universe.
Suddenly, it became an almost soul-crushing experience.
The part that I thought would be most challenging, turned out to be effortless.
The task I thought would be straightforward, became a Sisyphean task, one that might end in defeat.
Flush with delight at the first sale from my mother’s Vintage Etsy store, we innocently set out for the UPS store, assuming we were one credit card swipe away from victory.
Instead, the clerk emerged begrudgingly from behind the counter, measuring tape in hand.
After a few quick calculations, he informed us that the cost of sending the child’s rocker (which my mom had bought for $10 at a church sale and had now sold for $350) to its new owner in St. Louis, Missouri would be $650.
Even though Etsy had calculated the shipping at $135 (which the purchaser paid), that meant sale #1 would leave us $150 in the red.
Declining this opportunity to lose money, we departed the UPS, followed by a sweet suburban mom who’d overheard the conversation and, taking pity on us, volunteered her shipping expertise.
She strongly suggested we package the chair ourselves, then send it via an app called “PirateShip” which somehow mysteriously gives you much better rates on the same services.
“OK, problem almost solved,” I naively thought.
After all, how hard could it possibly be to find the right-sized box, I reasoned.
Trust me, you have no idea.
I hadn’t yet decided on a theme for this month’s meditation, but I was hovering around topics that would blend with the launch of my new quiz and the DailyOM Global Summitnext Sunday.
I’m delighted to be the final speaker and you can sign up with my discounted affiliate link
Inspired by my topic—Rewrite Your Story: The Neuroscience of Reinvention—and this particular UPS adventure, it seems only fitting that I dovetail both into the new meditation for June, “Out of The Box.”
You can experience it HERE.
The poet Camille T. Dungy wrote an essay I really like entitled “Box by Box” HERE.
Here’s how it opens:
My life is a life of boxes. It’s temporary, I trust. The hope, when one puts her whole life into boxes, is that, soon, her whole life will be out of boxes. But my parents speak, sometimes, of the as yet unpacked boxes they packed when they moved into their current house (that move happened in 1986) and so I fear, each time I pack another box, that I will never encounter its contents again.
Since most of my possessions are in storage, plus I’m now listing things on Etsy that have been similarly hibernating, I can relate.
A feeling of order and control can come from boxing things up, and simultaneously, a quiet irrational fear that you might somehow be trapping objects that yearn to be free.
Alas, there was no time for further whimsical indulgence, in that the ticking clock Etsy had set to mail our first sale was running out.
Here’s the tricky thing about mailing a rocking chair: the bottom is curved, making it a few inches longer than you might have measured.
This one was 24.5 inches while most large boxes are only 24.
My internet searching revealed that I could order 30-inch boxes from Uline, but I would have to purchase a minimum of five of them, and they would take 3–5 business days to arrive.
My friend ChatGPT initially told me that I could telescope two mid-sized Home Depot boxes together, and while that worked in some purely mathematical plane, it didn’t make sense in the real world.
(I think it was calculating the cubic volume, neglecting the actual reality of the dimensions.)
My mother went on a reconnaissance mission to see if any local furniture stores had suitable boxes from their deliveries.
She soon discovered the stockroom guys ran tight ships and broke them down immediately.
Despite realizing that, according to Kayak, it might actually be cheaper for me to fly to St. Louis and deliver the rocker in person, I still wouldn’t give up.
Gambling that there just might be a magical angle where the 24 inches could be angled properly… I went all in with a “24-inch shorty wardrobe” from the U-Haul store.
(Sidebar: I was too focused to get a pic, but the manager had a Yorkshire Terrier weighing about 5 pounds with a vest marked “Security.”)
Returning home, in what felt like a truly miraculous moment, my theory was right.
There was indeed one angle—and only one—where the rocker’s curved base somehow fit.
[Or else the Universe somehow took pity on me and, like the Tardis in Dr. Who, laws of time and space were temporarily suspended for my convenience.]
I love a good quiz, indeed almost any kind of personality assessment system.
Almost all of them give me a new insight into myself, some more valuable than others.
In some ways, such things can both put you into boxes and take you out.
Certain results can be simplistic and limiting, while others might just acknowledge and celebrate your individuality and nuances.
The philosophical concept of “Via Negative”—Latin for “the negative way”—refers to the idea that one can best define something by stating what it is not, rather than what it is.
You’re not this, and therefore that, in other words.
It’s beautifully captured in this poem by Mark Strand:
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
You probably assume that the saga of packing the rocking chair is nearly over, yet two plot twists remain.
The first: After effortlessly slipping the rocking chair into the Shorty Wardrobe box, I removed it to tape the bottom and add padding… And then for the life of me, I couldn’t get the chair to fit back in.
I tried for ten minutes to recreate the magical angle once again.
Like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, knowing it was theoretically possible yet endlessly eluding you, I wondered how my beginner’s luck had somehow abandoned me.
And then—perhaps miraculously—time and space bent to my will, and somehow I once again found that perfect positioning, apparently the only angle that works.
Twist Two: The PirateShip app gave nearly identical prices for UPS and the Post Office, and still smarting from the $650 experience, we opted to head to the latter.
To my consternation, the clerk—who had a real sitcom energy about her—informed me that although the U.S.P.S. website had confirmed we could mail it, her counter device told her we could not.
Apparently, USPS sometimes cares about weight, sometimes volume, sometimes it’s girth, but either way: the box has to behave with rules that seem to vary depending on which machine you’re talking to.
Returning to PirateShip, we printed out the labels for UPS, and headed there…Fingers Crossed.
This time, nothing could have been easier.
Although we slightly exceeded our $135 budget for shipping by about $50 (again, that tricky bottom of the rocker really throws estimates off) we were a financial galaxy away from $650.
Most importantly, the rocker arrived safe and sound.
In fact, just moments before I started this newsletter, we received a thank-you email from the Etsy buyer.
Delighted by the rocker and eager to share it with her grandkids, she even complimented our (perhaps overly) enthusiastic use of bubble wrap, saying it took her a full twenty minutes to unwrap the chair.
Bottom line: I’m back to feeling this as a full-blown, out of the box-level triumph.
Although the poet wrote—“I fear, each time I pack another box, that I will never encounter its contents again”—that was not my fear.
Mine was that somehow the right box didn’t exist, or more accurately couldn’t be purchased for a reasonable price or by our deadline.
Then I feared that, even boxed, the package couldn’t be delivered.
I’ve often felt that way before in my life, often from boxing in my identity and not fully living a life that’s rich with purpose.
I’ve learned—to paraphrase Mark Strand—that in a world of boxes, I am the absence of boxes.
Like a vintage rocker, seemingly bigger than whatever is trying to contain me, miraculously there is sometimes one elusive angle where everything works.
Surrounded by enough bubblewrap, perhaps I can travel anywhere…and so can you.
