When you're small and someone hands you a colouring book, the lines are already drawn for you. Stay inside them and you've done it right. Inside the lines is where everything is safe, predictable, where you know exactly how it's going to turn out. Stay within the borders and your drawing will always be beautiful. That's the whole appeal of it. But at some point, every child discovers the same small thrill, letting the crayon run just a little over the edge, and nothing bad happens.
That's where the real fun starts, and not just for a child with a crayon. The moment you cross a border, tempt a rule, push against something that was supposed to be fixed, that's usually where exploration begins. Where innovation begins. Where creativity actually sparks into something. Staying inside the lines keeps things safe. Going outside them is where things get made.
My sister and I grew up in the same house, same parents, same everything, really, and somewhere along the way we ended up holding two completely different colouring books. She called me once in January, asking whether she should take the Gotthard tunnel or drive over the pass on a trip to Italy she was planning for August. Seven months out, and she'd already thought it through in detail. That's simply who she is. She still lives in the same city she was born in, and she is happy there.
I've lived in six countries. Another time she called and asked if I had any travel planned. I told her no, nothing at all. Two days later she saw on Facebook that I was in Saint Lucia, in the Caribbean. An opportunity came up, so I grabbed a bag and got on a plane. I did something similar with the Isle of Man itself, six years ago, a friend and I came here for half a day, cold, foggy, thoroughly miserable weather, to see if I might want to live here. By the end of that half day I'd decided. It could easily have gone the other way, I could have ended up somewhere I hated. It didn't. I'm still here, and I'm happy.
Her planning things carefully, well in advance, doesn't make her better than me. And me jumping into opportunities, collecting a few more bruises and scars along the way because of it, doesn't make me worse than her either. Neither way of living is the lesser one, they're just two different ones, sitting in the same family, working perfectly well for each of us.
Here's the part that gets me every time I think about it. If I introduce her to a friend of mine who's gone further outside the lines than I ever have, she sees someone reckless. I see someone brave. Neither of us is wrong. We're just standing in different spots, looking at the same person.
There's no better colouring book. There's only the one that's yours, and the relief of finding someone who lets you have it, even when theirs looks nothing like it. My sister has never once needed me to colour the way she does, and I've never needed her to colour the way I do. We just love each other exactly as we are, lines and all.
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.
