It's Time to Color Outside the Lines

[Phoenix]

One day last summer, I walked into the living room and found my six-year-old grandson sitting quietly, head down, coloring a picture. His lips pursed, his small jaw-line tense, he held his crayon tightly in his small balled up hand.

“What are you coloring?” I asked and sat down beside him.

“Diego,” he said, without looking up.

“Are you having fun?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”

“Well, if you were having fun, I think you’d know it,” I said and ruffled his curly blonde hair.

He took in a deep breath and let it out. He puckered his thin pink lips, gripped the crayon tighter, and guided it along Diego’s tiny shirtsleeve.

“You know you can color outside the lines,” I said.

His head jerked up. His brown eyes widened. I knew I had overstepped an unspoken boundary. “My teacher said I have to color inside the lines,” he said, his little eye brows jutting up in arrow-like arches.

“Not everyone colors in the lines,” I told him.

He looked down at his picture. “Everyone in my class does,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “if you want to be like everyone else in your class, I guess you should just continue coloring inside the lines.”

His hand relaxed. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and ever so slowly let his crayon drift outside the line. “Like this?” he asked.

I put my hand over his and drew a squiggly line over one of the thick black lines. He giggled. “In school,” I told him, “you have to do what your teacher says, but when you’re at home, you can color anyway you want.”

He gave me his best big toothless grin. “Cool,” he said and went back to coloring inside the lines.

Coloring outside the lines can be costly. I know. My daughter liked purple trees. Her kindergarten teacher felt they should be green. When I insisted that she allow my child to use her own artistic instinct to recreate on paper the world that she saw in her mind, the teacher went ballistic. You would have thought that I had asked her to let the child smoke pot. In the end, the school system forced my daughter to color code her world according to their template.

My son liked to write dark stories with scary pictures. His third grade teacher thought for sure that he was either a devil worshiper or a deranged lunatic. Again, I went into the classroom fully armed and ready for battle. Again, I lost. The school system decreed what was acceptable writing and drawing and what was not. Luckily, my children were quick learners and knew where and when it was safe to color outside the lines. Home was a creative safe zone. School was not. It’s sad. We live in a world that is in dire need of creative genius, yet, far too often, we allow our children’s as well as our own creativity to be stifled.

Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Picasso’s words resonate with my creative spirit. I grew up in a no creativity zone—a zone where hard work equated to either backbreaking labor or a job that was highly valued by society. My parents were hell bent on ensuring that their daughter didn't grow up to become a starving artist begging on some street corner—their words, not mine.

They and my teachers did everything they could to steer me onto a more socially acceptable path. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for them. I was an odd child—at least that’s what they kept telling me. I was always drawing strange pictures and writing odd little stories. They were always yelling at me to get my head out of the clouds. Being the precocious little twit that I was, I would just look at them and smile. Even at that age, I somehow knew that they had no idea just how much a person could learn out there, in the clouds.

It took them awhile, but they eventually won. I learned how to color inside the lines. I also learned how to daydream without appearing to do so and how to store volumes of stories in my head. I even learned how to doodle—the socially acceptable form of drawing. After years of conditioning, I got married, had kids, got my socially acceptable degree, and a 9-5 job, to boot.

Then it hit me. Some said it was menopause. Ladies, don't you just hate it when they use your hormones against you? Others thought I had lost my mind. I guess it did seem a bit odd. My kids were grown. I had a slew of grandkids to play with. I had gone back to school to finish yet another degree, and wham bam it was over. I finally figured out what had been digging at me all those years. I didn't want to be anything other than a writer; and, by golly, that was what I was going to be. I quit school. Gave up my cushy retirement plan and wrote.

I’ve been coloring outside the lines for over seven years now. Has it been easy? No! Has it been worth it? Hell yeah it has. While coloring outside the lines can be costly, remaining inside the lines of the mechanically reproduced image of what society thinks you should be can be deadly. I know. I had started to die. Seriously, I got physically ill. That’s what happens when you deny who you really are and don the mask that society has created for you.

Today, I want to challenge you to step into your creativity. I want to challenge you to strip off society’s mask and start coloring outside the lines. The world is waiting for you. It doesn’t matter how you express your creativity. You just need to express it. You are the artist. You were given a unique gift. It’s time to give it back to the world. There is only one you, and only you can give your gift to the world. Write it, paint it, sing it, play it, dance it. Just do it!

Nuff Said!

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