Colouring outside the lines, part II
(This note follows on from an earlier one, Colouring outside the lines. If you want the first half, it's here: https://www.jeroenwats.com/notes/colouring-outside-the-lines)
I wrote before about my sister and me. Same house, same parents, same everything, really, and yet somehow we grew up approaching life completely differently, her carefully, mine by jumping straight in. I called it holding two different colouring books, the lines being the boundaries each of us is comfortable staying inside, or happily drawing past. Zoom out far enough, and the same thing is true of an entire city, an entire country, the entire world.
I was born in Dordrecht, a city of about 123,000 people. Zoom out and that's the Netherlands, roughly 18 million. Zoom out again and it's Europe, something like 745 million. Zoom out once more and it's the whole world, over 8.4 billion people, each one holding their own version of the same blank page.
But the same question I'd ask about my sister and me applies here too, just at a much bigger scale, where's the line, and how do you know when someone's crossed it. I think it comes down to context, the same way it would with something as ordinary as speed on a road. Drive twenty kilometres over the limit on an empty motorway, good conditions, a car built to handle it, and you're not really putting anyone at risk. Drive that same speed in heavy traffic, in rain or snow, where the margin for error is gone and one mistake becomes everyone's problem, and it's an entirely different exercise. Same number, completely different question.
That's the test I'd apply to culture and belief too. Colouring outside the lines, living differently, believing differently, is fine, in any shape, as long as nobody else's safety or dignity gets spent to make it possible. Respect for someone's religion. Respect for their habits, their traditions, the colour of their skin, who they love. The moment that respect disappears, the moment someone's safety, physical or mental, is no longer guaranteed because of how they colour their own page, everything tips over. It stops being difference and starts being harm.
So the same rule holds, whether it's two siblings in one family or eight billion people across one planet. The variety is the beautiful part. The condition that makes it beautiful is that nobody pays for someone else's colours with their own safety.
Somewhere today, you'll pass someone colouring their page in a way that makes no sense to you, a stranger, a neighbour, someone at work who prays differently, loves differently, simply lives differently than you do. There's a version of that moment where the difference bothers you. And there's another version, the one that costs nothing and asks for everything, where you just let them have their page, the same way you'd want yours left alone.
