Template Tantrum

%&!##>!!  I hate using templates!  How many times have you gotten caught in a template and simply wanted to go outside the margins to add a word, or reconfigured a section and end up with everything in disarray? Just like trying to maneuver in rush hour traffic, it can be incredibly frustrating.  I was attempting to make a brochure for an event and found a creative eye-catching template design, something I never could have created with my limited skills. However, in the midst of what I thought was making progress, I found what I wanted to express just didn’t fit within the pre-formatted outline and the margins wouldn't move.

As I considered the situation, I realized that I often feel like this in my life experience.  Take for example when I wake up to an alarm clock in the morning.  I’d like to move that margin. This is a simple example, but it propelled me to think more about the pre-formatted outlines of daily experience.  My ideas often don’t fit within the framework of say, corporate confines. For example, why are measurements needed before implementing a cost effective, timely, and brilliant idea? (Mine, of course.)  And how would you actually measure a sense of good will? There are any number of rules and regulations that seem to stand in the way of progress. You could churn in the eddies of obstacles forever.

In thinking further about templates and the underlining, unseen framework that I bump into at times, I came upon an interesting perspective. I realized that the measures in music and the rhyme in poetry are boundaries, as well.  These structures contain and are the impetus for great creativity.  In writing poetry there is often a mental search for the perfect word.  At times, what becomes “the perfect word" might not have been considered because a patterned approach to language would have fallen into place.  But with the restrictive confines and cadences, the perfect word meaningfully emerges. There is a small sense of triumph when this happens.  

When you overlay this perspective onto everyday experience things feel a little different – more like poetry.  I don’t mean a “look for the positive white-washed view,” but in a deep measured sense – an inner rhythm and rhyme you can work with and count on.

Well, I’m settled for now and my eye-catching brochure is at the printers.  As always, I'll be considering these ideas more. Join me.