We have all been young once right? and somewhere in time...we were drawing at school, be it stick figures or a full blown Picasso creation. Yet as we learn to color, we are given empty images and we have to color them in. As a child new to the universe, our world is full of wonderment. People stop to hear the crazy things that can come out of a five year old child and they get retold, so the child tries harder to be more crazier next time to get more attention and more love. Its the same with coloring, kids just color how they want...they don't see the images as the boundaries of their coloring, they color till they feel its enough.
As the child grows, we slowly start to suffocate its free spirit, and try to rule it. The boundaries start to become defined. The wings of imagination become clipped, the wonderment and incessant questions start to cease, a spirit is stifled. Alas, there comes the generelisations: An "A" student, a geek and many other names to keep people the way we think they should be, and when you give that young person to color - they do it within the boundaries.
Those are the lessons that are taken into adulthood. Keep your head in, don't stand out too much, do what you have to do so that you can do what you want to do, and from then every moment of your life has a manual on what should happen. It is amazing how many of us keep with this status quo. We still listen to that faraway voice that says: don't color outside the boundaries. Yet we don't still play with the same dolls or fit in the same clothes, we grow, and we accept that we change.
A time has to come that the mindset has to change. Its easy to stand with a crowd, it takes courage to stand alone. Standing alone requires you to be comfortable with yourself, re-establishing the boundaries, freeing the yearnings so long locked up and assuming the absurd. That maybe you are not the only one struggling, that maybe by getting to know yourself, you not only get the feel good factor but you also allow others the possibility of trying to do the same.
I think its neither black nor white. Its not gray either. Its a rainbow of colors. There are no boundaries, no shape and no form. Don't walk - run. Don't smile - laugh your heart out. DO all the things that you ever wanted to do, right now, today: because that is all you've got. Re-define the boundaries for you and color them as you see fit.
