Unboxing Assumptions
Or: what a stick figure taught us about belonging.
Hi!
Please get a pen and paper.
We are being serious, go find one! This will only take a minute, and it’s worth it. We are waiting. Okay, I see you tapping your pen now, waiting for the next instruction…
Draw three boxes. Biggest to smallest. Now, in the largest box, draw a stick figure — the whole thing, head to toe, arms out, so it fits comfortably inside. Now, fit that same stick figure, at the exact same size, into each of the smaller boxes.
Come on, don’t read on yet. Try it first!
Did you get stuck?
Most of us do. The boxes are too small. The figure won’t fit. It feels impossible, a little frustrating, maybe even a trick question.
But here’s the thing. We never said the stick figure had to stay whole. We only said: don’t change the size. Which means you could take it apart. Arm in one corner. Legs folded. Head tucked to the side. Every piece, same size, different arrangements. The figure fits.
We’re the ones who decided it was a person. And we’re the ones who decided a person can’t come apart. Nobody told us that. We just… assumed.
There’s an 18-year-old named Arthur from France who spent most of his childhood in Hong Kong and never really lived there. He went to a French school and had French friends but never learned Cantonese. Never fell in love with the food or the streets or the particular noise of that city. He was in Hong Kong the way you can be in a room without being in the room. And then he moved to America, and something in him decided: this time, I’m going to try. He played American sports and drove along the country roads during his breaks. He let himself be a little lost and a little changed. And it was… nice. He felt at home. Really at home, maybe for the first time.
He was so surprised by it that he went back to Hong Kong that same summer, and tried again.
“Try to fit in wherever you are.” — Arthur, 18, France
What strikes us about Arthur isn’t that he changed. It’s that he stopped assuming he couldn’t. He’d been carrying around this idea, maybe without knowing it, that belonging was something that happened to you, or didn’t. That you were either the kind of person who fit in somewhere or you weren’t. That you had to stay exactly as you were or risk losing yourself entirely.
And then one day he just… didn’t believe that anymore. He took himself apart a little. Rearranged. And discovered he fit just fine.
With a little rearranging,
Team FUEL
P.S. Arthur’s life lesson inspired us to design the activity. If you find yourself saying, “I want to try one more!”, head to the World Wisdom Map Education Module!