There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from doing too much of the wrong thing — following someone else’s map while our own sits folded in our back pocket, untouched. Clinical sociologist, author, and mental health pioneer Ross Ellenhorn, PhD, has spent decades studying what it actually means to build a life, and his conclusion might surprise us: the most direct route to meaning and well-being isn’t the straight and narrow. It’s the winding, crayon-colored, occasionally illegible line we draw ourselves.

In his book Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life, Ellenhorn offers a liberating counter-narrative to the achievement-obsessed scripts most of us have inherited. The premise is deceptively simple: we are the authors of our existence. But the practice—learning to play, experiment, and color outside the lines without shame—turns out to be one of the most courageous and profoundly human things we can do.

Why Playfulness Isn’t Frivolous — It’s Foundational

We live in a culture that has largely outsourced play to childhood and then surgically removed it from adult life. Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, most of us absorbed the message that seriousness equals legitimacy. That productivity is virtuous. The person who plays is the one who should not be taken seriously. Turns out this notion is a myth.

Positive psychology research presents a significantly different perspective. Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has documented play as a biological necessity—not a luxury—integral to emotional regulation, creativity, and resilience across the lifespan. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory demonstrates that the positive emotions activated through playful engagement literally expand our cognitive and behavioral repertoire, building lasting psychological resources over time.

In other words, play is not the opposite of purpose. It is one of its primary access roads.

Ellenhorn’s framework invites us to reclaim what was never supposed to leave —our capacity to approach our lives with curiosity, experimentation, and even delight. When we play, we try things. When we try things, we discover what resonates. When we discover resonance, we find our direction. Purpose, in this model, isn’t a destination we arrive at through relentless striving. It’s something we stumble into through joyful, intentional engagement with our lives.

The Courage to Color Outside the Lines

Coloring outside the lines requires something most personal development frameworks undervalue: the willingness to be silly, to look foolish, to experiment without any guarantee of outcome, and to resist the seduction of the predetermined answer. It asks us to tolerate the discomfort of not-yet-knowing.

Hannah Arendt, whose philosophy of natality—the idea that every human being arrives in the world as something genuinely new—runs parallel to Ellenhorn’s thinking in striking ways. For Arendt, the capacity to begin, to initiate something unprecedented, is the very essence of human freedom. When we color outside the lines, we exercise that freedom in its most personal and immediate form. We insist that our lives will not be reproductions of a template but original works of art.

This isn’t recklessness. It’s radical self-authorship.

And yet, so many of us resist it. We cling to the lines because they feel safe, because deviation invites judgment, and because we’ve internalized the metrics of other people’s definitions of success. Ellenhorn’s work gently and persistently asks: whose life are we living, exactly?

Meaning Is Made, Not Found

One of the more liberating reframes in positive psychology is the shift from meaning as something hidden in the world, waiting to be discovered, to meaning as something we actively construct through engagement, relationships, and commitment. Viktor Frankl argued this point from inside a concentration camp. Martin Seligman embedded it in the PERMA model, where “M”—meaning—is understood as a connection to something larger than oneself, arrived at through active participation, not passive search.

What Ellenhorn adds is the creative dimension: meaning isn’t just constructed through physical action, it’s also drawn. Sketched. Revised. Sometimes, we may crumple it up and start over again. The metaphor of the crayon is apt because crayons are both low-stakes and expressive—they invite iteration without the weight of permanence. We can color the sky purple if we like. We can go back and make it green. There is liberation in our creativity.

This is a profoundly hopeful model of the self: not fixed, not finished, not condemned to the first draft.

Practices: Drawing Our Own Lives

The following practices are drawn from positive psychology research and aligned with Ellenhorn’s invitation to live more playfully, purposefully, and on our own terms.

1. The Purple Crayon Inventory: Set a timer for 20 minutes and write freely in response to this prompt: “If no one were watching, judging, or grading—what would we actually want our lives to look like?” We don’t edit. We don’t perform. We let the lines go where they go. Social expectations and self-monitoring can overshadow our deepest desires and important values, but this exercise helps to bring them to the forefront.

2. Play Archaeology: Recall three activities from childhood that produced genuine absorption and joy—what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” We write them down, then ask, “What is the adult equivalent?” What current or possible activities share the same underlying quality of engagement? This exercise often points toward vocational and avocational possibilities that feel alive rather than obligatory.

3. The 10% Experiment: Rather than overhauling our lives, we identify one area where we could devote 10% more energy to exploration, creativity, or play this week. Research on habit formation consistently shows that small behavioral shifts, sustained over time, produce the most durable change. The 10% experiment removes the all-or-nothing pressure and makes coloring outside the lines feel genuinely possible.

4. Meaning Mapping: Draw—literally draw—a map of what currently feels meaningful in our lives. Using symbols, color, and spatial relationships, we represent the people, activities, values, and aspirations that matter to us. We notice what’s at the center and what’s at the margins. We notice what’s missing. This visual practice activates non-verbal processing and often reveals patterns that language alone obscures.

5. The “So That” Chain: Take any goal or commitment currently on our plate and ask, “I want this… so that…?” Then ask it again and again, paying attention to the answers. We keep going until we reach a value or feel a sense of aliveness. This practice, rooted in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, helps us to distinguish between goals that are genuinely ours and those adopted from external scripts.

The Good Life, Redrawn

The ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia—often translated as flourishing or “the good life”—was never meant to be a standardized exam with a single right answer. It was an invitation to live in alignment with our deepest nature, in community with others, in engagement with the world. In its own way, it was an invitation to explore beyond the conventional boundaries…with purposeful meaning.

Ross Ellenhorn’s work reminds us that the art supplies were never taken away. The blank page is still in front of us. The question is whether we’ll reach for someone else’s stencil—or pick up the purple crayon and begin.

RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION

• Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life — Ross Ellenhorn, PhD
• Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
• Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul — Stuart Brown, MD
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The Happiness Advantage — Shawn Achor

Like what you’re reading? Want more consciously prepared brain food?

Listen to this Harvesting Happiness episode: Coloring Outside the Lines: How Playfulness Leads to Life Purpose with Ross Ellenhorn, PhD or wherever you get your podcasts. 

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