Lately I’ve been feeling like all I do is put things into boxes, both physical objects or conceptual entities.

My day job involves administration and people — lots of administration, lots of people — and yet it still feels like most of what I do is classifying information, sorting things, and putting stuff in boxes. Or if I’m lucky, lists.

Data goes in little spreadsheet boxes.

Event RSVPs go into their lists (numbered, of course).

Responses from an investigative interview get sorted and categorized.

Planning ideas get dissected nine ways from Sunday and assigned dates and executors, flayed out like butterflies held down with pins.

And even when I get home, I’m looking to move soon, which means packing up my physical belongings and putting them in literal boxes.

It’s exhausting.

I’m the type of person who likes to make connections. I like music that crosses genres, and things that are hard to describe. I’m very comfortable with things NOT fitting in boxes, with the ambiguity of unclassified data.

(There’s a reason I like Beethoven so much more than Mozart.)

It’s good to classify things. Classification is necessary to guide communication and clarify thoughts and ideas. But sometimes ideas need to breath and run free.

When my own instinct is to run free, it’s exhausting for me to toil at chasing those things down and put them in boxes. I’d rather be out there with them.

But a society can’t function when everything is running free. Sometimes we need boxes — like, say, a wall — to create order and delineate concepts.

There’s a balance. I suspect that balance leans more toward “things in boxes” than “things running free,” but that is part of the price we pay for a civilized society where everyone uses the same language and the same social conventions.

We have to save running free for our own time.

So getting paid to put things in boxes is probably just good practice on how to be a good citizen. We sacrifice a little of our personal freedom to use the same types of boxes our fellow citizens use, so that we can have common ground.

That’s the ideal, at least.