The coloring book was for the kids. I want that on the record. I ordered it for the kids, from our week at the lake, and for the kids it remained, right up until a Tuesday night in June.
Everyone was asleep. I had done the dishes and answered the emails and laid out the school clothes, and I sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea to scroll my phone in the classic manner of the modern exhausted parent.
The book was lying there, open to a page nobody had claimed. The jetty at dusk, all clean lines, waiting. My daughter’s pencils were in reach. I picked up the grey one, just to do the sky, just for a minute.
Some nights the crayons
are for the grown-ups.
{Tweet that.}
It was eleven o’clock when I looked up. The sky was finished, and so was the water, and I had strong feelings about which grey belonged where, and my tea was stone cold, and I felt better than I had all week.
I know adult coloring books have been a thing for years. I had filed them under “nice for other people,” alongside sourdough and marathons. What caught me off guard was coloring a place I had actually stood. That page put me back on the jetty at dusk. I could hear it. Somewhere in all that careful shading of water, the noise of the week went quiet, one pencil stroke at a time.
There is science on this, about repetitive creative motion calming the nervous system, and I believe every word of it, but I’ll tell you what sold me. For forty minutes I thought about one good evening from my own life, slowly and on purpose. When do we ever do that? We took 300 photos at that lake. Until that night, I had properly looked at none of them.
I have since bought my own pencils. I keep them on a high shelf with a vagueness about their ownership that fools nobody. The kids know. My oldest has taken to leaving the book open at pages he thinks I’d like, which might be the kindest thing anyone has done for me this year.
So yes. The coloring book was for the kids. The next one will have some pages that are mine.
Outline Origins turns your photos into coloring books, and we have stopped pretending they are only for children. Order one from a place you loved and leave it on the kitchen table some quiet night. See what happens.
