A Kid’s Unfulfilled Colouring-In Book
I was at a the house of a friend who has a 5 year old daughter the other day, and watched as the girl painstakingly coloured in every single section within the lines, to create a beautiful fluoro-pink and purple rendition of ScoobyDoo.
Her little 3 year old brother, on the other hand, much like my own son, scribbled all over the drawing as though it were a blank sheet of paper. He completely violated the simple rule of the book…colour in the pictures within its clearly defined & inked boundaries. Its not that it was intentional…apart from his lack of fine motor skill with a texta, he just didn’t see the ‘boundaries’.
That’s kids, isn’t it? We exist as beings of light that are everywhere and everything, then get born into a human body container with boundaries, and a world with social norms and boundaries, and have to learn all about being finite and limited in a world of boundaries (then we all have midlife crises and find our way back to the truth 40 years later, but that’s another story).
Boundaries. Like the human rights & laws of the current time. Or the social norms of any given society, the particular etiquette of various regions and cultural groups. Or right down to the personal boundaries of each person and what they will and wont accept in their various relationships with others.
Our parents, if we get good ones, try their hardest to teach boundaries in order that we experience freedom and grow up to feel independent, empowered, autonomous and nurture our creativity. Because in order to navigate life, community and the current world, to form healthy connections with family, friends and lovers, in order that we be happy, we need boundaries. We need to know how to communicate what those boundaries are so that others know, and to respect the boundaries of others.
As someone who has had to learn the hard way what healthy boundaries are, well into my adulthood, I do vouch for their importance. There are some really mean and selfish people out there. Yeah, I know that everyone reviews their own life after they die – and for some who were particularly cruel or awful that can be a kind of hell – and in that life-review, any person who has hurt me will feel what I felt, and truly understand (sorry for going esoteric on you, I’m done now). But my boundary now is that if someone can’t recognise that their actions hurt me and say sorry in the here and now of life – regardless of blame or pesky details – then there’s no respect and so until there is, they’re out of my circle. Brene Brown puts it succinctly;
Anyhoo, back to the colouring-in books. So as you can imagine, I felt so sorry for the characters on the pages, staring up at their childish owners, crying out for their own boundaries to be seen and acknowledged. Crying out for skin or fur tones, bright clothing, green flower stems and multicoloured petals. My heart broke, as I thought of the hundreds of thousands of colouring books over the century, who had never had even one of their pages reach its full potential.
But then I thought, their true symbolic meaning, of boundaries and how they can actually create a sense of colour and beauty when respected, is a valuable life lesson – and a child slowly but surely learning the Golden Rule of various colouring-in books, holds him/her in good stead for the rest of life. Boundaries.
Thankyou colouring-in books. Thankyou for your sacrifice.
