colouring outside the lines

Lately, I have been jotting, scribbling and doodling thoughts, words, phrases, or whatever comes to mind(in part because of this); a type of journaling, only minus the journal. (One of the reasons I am delighted about the journal swap). I do have a couple of journals but I never journaled consistently or fully utilized them. Now that I have a blog, I need a place to jot all these ideas down.

Something told me to keep these pieces, just in case, and well, I did just that. I held on to these scribbles, even if they are on hotel notepads and restaurant napkins. Voilà!


In one my posts, titled hope, I included a link to this post over at Tongue in Cheek. After linking it to my post, I read it again, only this time clicking on a link in that post, titled speak of rebirth, which I had missed the first time around.

There it was, a beautiful blog banner with the title Colouring Outside The Lines. I understand these words are not completely original in their text, or that they haven’t been widely used but for me they meant so much more. Those four words, and the context in which I had spoken them, had been a story shared in my family for a long time. A little girl who just happened to be very particular about her things, and her doings (and still is in some ways) could not understand why a little boy would purposely make a mess of things.

Let’s go back a few years, more specifically to my early childhood. As told by my mother. One day a fellow playmate and me were involved with some crayons and colouring books, mind you these were my colouring books. I became upset and started to cry, the frustrated, how dare he, whining cry (moms, you know this whine) and my mom asked, “What’s the matter?” I replied tearfully, “He’s colouring outside the lines!” I was not happy, and after all, if he wanted to mess things up shouldn’t he be doing it in his own colouring book. I mean really, the nerve!

Seeing the title “Colouring Outside The Lines”, made me think of that little girl and I laughed. Yes, the story still gets laughs from the family, all at my expense, of course; but what really got me was I had just recently jotted this down on a napkin.