I hated coloring inside the lines, so I decided to make my own.

As soon as that sentence entered my head, I knew it was important. 
I knew it was more than the sum of its words' meanings.

I remember kindergarten: Mrs. Garner. I got her near the end of her career. She was terrifying. Not terribly warm for a kindergarten teacher. I remember on a field trip I was in my own world (some things never change), and she yanked me by my bad arm (the one that was still healing from a horrible injury), and my father, who was chaperoning the trip, wanted to rip her arm out of its socket.

I remember we had to draw and color things. I drew a beaver or a woodchuck or some sort of brown varmint. I wanted to be done with it and move on to the next thing because filling the color in between the lines didn't interest me. There was not enough dopamine for my burgeoning ADHD superpowers, and it was a menial task. Kryptonite for the young Strohmeister.

So I handed it in so I could go play or draw something else.

"It's not done. It's sloppy."

I go back, I shade in more...

"Tommy, it's not finished. Don't be lazy, it's sloppy."

I feel an upwelling of desperation. I hatch a plan. My 5-year-old mind goes back to Mrs. Garner and my 5-year-old mouth, a mouth that rarely spoke, but when it had something to say, it presented its case: "He just took a shower. The white streaks are soap that he didn't rinse."

That satisfied the judge, and I went off to build an elaborate tower from wood blocks, wherein if I pulled one particular block out of a floor, it opened a trap door to catch these colored wooden clown figures.

I was awarded "Class Thinker" that June. Plus ça change...

I hated coloring inside the lines, so I decided to make my own.

Meaningless tasks. 
Most of us need meaning.
Even those more accepting of a menial task long for something deeper, in their core.
They're just better at repressing their species-being.

We want to create. 
We want to make meaning. 
Some of us are just more in-touch with that creative impulse, and the psychic and physiological pain of repressing that drive is too much.

I hated coloring inside the lines, so I decided to make my own.

Coloring the entire beaver/woodchuck/brown varmint without leaving spots was a waste of my time, and I knew it.

43 years later, I still see the ridiculousness of the task.

I hated coloring inside the lines, so I decided to make my own.

The irony is that I love shading today. 
I love shading my own art. I love creating, drawing, filling in. 
I love making my own shapes, my own lines... and I LOVE when those shapes and lines intersect with the rest of reality and I lose the boundaries of where my creation ends and the creation of reality begins, and I feel like a co-creator of all that is, was, and will ever be.

I do this drawing, I do this shading, I do this coloring, I do this singing, I do this playing, I do this praying, I do this meditation, I do this scrolling, I do this learning, reading, watching, talking, listening, hearing, teaching, interacting, encouraging, hugging, loving, loving, loving.

What is love but realizing this world—this imperfect, ugly, beautiful, serenely chaotic shithole of a heaven in which we find ourselves—is worth the contribution, is worth the creation, is worth leaving your mark, because your mark is an eddy that shapes the river of spacetime fornowandforever.