A friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook last week of her patio. On the table was a glass of wine, a plate of food and a colouring book. Not just any colouring book, either: The One and Only Adult Colouring Book.
I was curious but I left well alone: I’m a fully-grown and (almost) fully-functioning adult, I wasn’t about to start spending my precious free time colouring in!
But three days later, beyond stressed, decaffeinated and traipsing around Southampton, I ducked into Waterstones for a breather and there it was: The One and Only Adult Colouring Book, in pride of place on a display table in the centre of the shop, surrounded by colouring pencils, crayons and felt tip pens.
I must have stood there for almost half an hour, agonising over whether or not I could justify buying myself a colouring book, trying to remember whether or not I still possessed any colouring pencils with which to enjoy it.
Tearing myself away with the same argument as before, I continued on my way empty-handed.
By lunchtime the following day I had a book on order and had sharpened as many colouring pencils as I could find in my catastrophe of a desk.
When the book arrived, I thumbed through it with a residual sense of guilt: I’m a busy woman, with a fairly high-pressure job, a lot of deadlines and far too many lines to learn in what spare time I can snatch, why on earth had I spent my hard-earned cash on a pursuit I abandoned in middle school?
With my limited artistic capabilities, I settled on a fairly simple picture of a flower as my first engagement with this so-called ‘relaxation technique’ and selected a bright yellow pencil to kick things off.
Two hours later and I was still going, determined to finish my picture. I think I was sort of missing the point: I was getting agitated when I went outside of the lines and spent far too much time trying to choose the right colours and make it as close to perfect as possible.
Even so, I wasn’t thinking about the stresses of the day, about impending events or personal dramas. I was thinking about colours and which ones would look best next to each other, which picture I should colour next, which green would best set off that blue…
As a child, I was a perfectionist. As an adult, I am, if possible, even harder on myself about success and failure – anything less than perfect isn’t good enough and I have a habit of pushing myself almost to burnout on a worryingly regular basis. Or so my friends tell me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly normal behaviour!
The beauty of colouring in, of course, is that the colours are hard to erase once they’re down on paper – there’s no sitting in front of a computer screen for hours, adjusting this proposal and that proposal until you’re happy with it. You just have to give it a go and hope you’ve made the right choice; just pick a colour, go for it and damn the uncoordinated consequences!
And thus, there is one more colouring-in convert in the world, shading away her worries in a rainbow of colour. Mission accomplished, colouring book. Mission accomplished.
Approach With Caffeine 