A few months ago I was doing a lead at a local AA meeting when an interesting girl walked up to me after I was finished and told me she had been able to pay attention for the entire time I spoke. She then showed me a book, said it was an adult coloring one, and explained it was normally what kept her attention deficit disorder at bay during most meetings. While I was grateful for her compliment and gave that credit to my Higher Power, I was actually more interested in talking about the book she had just showed me, which was titled “Color Me Calm, 100 Coloring Templates for Meditation and Relaxation.”
She explained that somehow coloring helped her to focus, as well as keep her relatively still for long periods of time. At first, I couldn’t imagine how something as simple as coloring could do that, but then I thought about the complex puzzles I do from time to time and how that achieves the very same thing for me. I asked to look through her book, saw how it wasn’t just basic pictures, and it began to make sense. There were intricate mandalas, waterscapes, wooded scenes, geometric patterns, and much more spread throughout the book, each having very precise areas to color. As I drove home from the meeting after that, I remembered my childhood coloring days when I would take crayons and try to stay within the borders of whatever picture I was working on, even ones that should have been extremely simple, except they never were for me. Usually I just got frustrated and smeared the entire page with a big mess of colored scribbles. After recollecting those not so pleasant memories of my earliest attempts at being an artist, I put the entire adult coloring book thing behind me, that was until I got on the phone with my sister a day or so later.
When I asked what she was up to during my call to her, she said she was working on a picture in her adult coloring book and all I could say was, “Really?” She wasn’t kidding and told me it was truly helping her in the same ways it had helped that girl from the meeting I did my lead at. It was then I knew I didn’t need a third reminder to come my way, as that regularly seems to be what happens when my Higher Power wants me to pursue something that would help me on my spiritual journey. Within a day or so after that phone call, I ordered that Color Me Calm book, two sets of artists colored stencils, and a manual sharpener. And wouldn’t you know, once I received it and began doing some of my own coloring again after decades of not doing so, I actually found great joy and peace in it.
While I can’t really say I understand why coloring helps me these days rather than aggravate me like it always used to, I’m just grateful I’ve found yet another way to slow down, meditate, and relax in a world that often seems so darn filled with too much hustle and bustle. And now it seems as if everyone else is finding this out as well, because everyone I end up talking to about this says they too are getting into the adult coloring book craze.
So if you happen to be someone who’s trying to find a way to create a little more peace in your life, I suggest trying this route, as you may soon discover just like I and so many others already have, how it can come from something as simple as coloring…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
That’s what my knitting does.
I might have to learn how to do that some day 🙂
There are several people I know who knit during 12-step meetings. There was a fellow in Lenexa, KS, who used to tie fishing-flies during meetings. And, like many unthinking, self-righteous people, I mistook their activity for being bored with the meeting, yet wanting to be there to “be seen” as attending the meeting.
My character defect was erroneously judging them, in seeing their activity as a lack of discipline, as being unwilling to “just sit up and pay attention, dammit.” While *I* can sit and discipline myself to look directly at the person speaking in a meeting, and focus on their words, others constantly have internal voices calling them to distraction….and the knitting or fly-fishing or coloring puts the inner voices at bay, so they can actually *hear* what is being said.
Proof, yet again, that I can never truly know the mind or the heart of another – nor can I truly see what struggles and preconceptions that others unknowingly bring to the table.
Great insight Steve. Thanks for your comments. 🙂