There are two things I did in the past that still make me blush when I think about them.

The first was harmless. I once gave my Irish colleague an entire bag of those tiny soy sauce fish you get with takeaway sushi. Not just one or two — an entire year’s worth that I had been saving from office lunches. When he opened the bag, we laughed uncontrollably. That kind of prank felt very pure back then. It wasn’t meant to embarrass anyone. It was simply absurd.

The second one wasn’t quite as harmless.

During a trip to China, I bought a ridiculously cool neon display for the back of a car. The remote control could sit on the steering wheel, and the rear window could display all kinds of animated icons or messages. At the time I thought it was the coolest thing ever, so I gave it to him as a Christmas present. He loved it.

After the holidays, he told me something had happened.

The police had pulled him over and fined him more than four hundred dollars.

He had been using the sign to show a middle finger to the car behind him.

At that moment I felt a little guilty.

In my mind, it was creativity.
In his reality, it was illegal.

That’s when I began to realize that contexts are not universal. The same joke or idea doesn’t work everywhere.

Often we don’t intend to do anything wrong. We just tend to notice what’s fun before we notice the rules.

Some people have a natural instinct for the environment they’re in. I’m not one of them. I often light a spark in the wrong place, or do something foolish where the rules say I shouldn’t.

But perhaps that isn’t entirely a bad thing.

It simply reminds me that creativity needs a sense of context.

Freedom, too, requires boundaries.



—— XC Scribbles · 壹佰伍拾陸 CLVI 🔥