“Live life to the fullest. You have to color outside the lines once in a while if you want to make your life a masterpiece. Laugh some every day, keep growing, keep dreaming, keep following your heart. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” — Albert Einstein

I’m usually suspicious of quotes attributed to famous people but can’t find anything that contradicts the source, so thanks for the advice, uh, Albert. He seemed like the kind of guy who might have actually said it anyway. But I digress…

I was always a meticulous “color within the lines” kind of wanna-be artist. The lines were there for a reason, weren’t they? Don’t stray beyond, I’d tell myself. It wasn’t until I was older that I started figuring out that the lines were just someone else’s interpretation of where they should be. And I started straying beyond and finding out that that’s where the magic is. So I’d stray a bit farther still.

When you color outside the lines you begin to notice the other people who color beyond the lines. There’s a whole community of outside the lines people fully enjoying their lives while the inside the lines people grind through their days. Coloring beyond is invigorating and a bit audacious. Following other people’s rules is constricting and subservient. Who do we really want to be, ourselves or someone else’s version of who we ought to be?

Monday mornings feel a bit different when you stray outside the lines. At the moment, I’m thinking I ought to stray a bit further to see just how audacious I can be today. We can’t make our own masterpiece following someone else’s plan, can we? Carpe diem, friend.