Live Outside the Lines
Life on the ground can be rigid. We spend the better part of our days living between the lines, whether it’s the boundaries of a house or office, the narrow edges of a sidewalk, or the wider lines of a highway.
It’s easy to believe we’re well-traveled when we go to different cities until we realize that what we’re doing is swapping out the confining lines of one place for another.
That’s one reason I like flying. From the air, the lines blur, if you see them at all. When you’re way up high, most of those lines mean nothing. I can slice above them, crossing at odd angles, but best of all, I can ignore them.
On the ground, I have to follow the lines, bound by a path someone else put down long ago. Then there are the invisible lines drawn all around us.
Society wants us to “walk the line,” to “stay on the straight and narrow.” It expects us to “keep it between the lines,” and above all, forbids us to “cross the line.”
For today, I plan to find ways to step outside the lines, even if it’s only beyond the ones I’ve created for myself, invisible ruts that have me doing the same things over and over.
For today, I will look for ways to slip off the beaten path, even if only to pierce the green curtain of some nearby woods for a few moments, to view the world from an alternate angle and marvel at how different it looks from my new vantage point.
For today, I’m going to dare the lines of my life to contain me.
What lines will you cross today?
I wrote this on a morning I needed to step outside my own rutted lines, and I still need the reminder more often than I’d like. I’ve started to wonder how many of the lines I live between I actually drew.
That question and others like it are at the heart of my novel, Flying Colors. John Freeman has spent years building the life he thought he wanted—until a strange encounter leads him to Air Haven, a grass airfield forgotten by the modern world. There, an old flight instructor named Kent draws John back to his childhood love of flying and challenges what he believes about success, choice, and the everyday magic he stopped noticing somewhere along the way.
If you’d like to see where John’s story begins, enter your email in the footer below. I’ll send you the prologue and first two chapters for free.
