by Maureen Thomson of Lyssabeth's Wedding Officiants

While walking the beach one drizzly Oregon day, I happened upon a little girl--perhaps five or six. She was wearing a pink jacket with multi-colored legwarmers, a green skirt, purple hat, yellow gloves, etc. You get my drift. The kid was a riot of colors. She was flying a kite in the rain and having a blast.

It crossed my mind--in watching her--that it's so much easier to break the rules when you don't yet know what they are. At her age, she hadn't been taught that colors are supposed to coordinate when putting together one's ensemble. She hadn't been made to believe that flying a kite in the rain is sheer lunacy. Quite simply, it didn't enter her mind to give a rat's patoot!

How brave we would be if we didn't know the rules that we were supposed to follow! We wouldn't even know we were being brave. We'd just...be. I was speaking to a fellow officiant from across the country last week and she mentioned that I was the only "wedding officiating company" of any substantial size of which she was aware. Most wedding officiants are one-(wo)man shows--or maybe a part of a collective of two or three. I realized, when my colleague said that, that I'd never given it much thought. No one ever told me that officiating was supposed to be a sole proprietorship. I just knew I wanted to expand my officiating style to offer it to as many couples as possible and since there is only so much of me to go around, the only alternative, it seemed, was to train others and have them work under my corporate umbrella.

This hasn't always been the case with me. I think I just got lucky in the business arena when it came to "not knowing any better". But in so many areas of my life, I've unconsciously conditioned myself to follow the rules. And isn't it amazing how we don't even know we're doing it? Several years ago, I was watching an Oprah show about makeovers. One comment from a stylist stood out in my mind. "A woman over 40 who pulls her hair back from her face adds 10 years to her looks." I looked in the mirror at my slung-back-into-a-ponytail do and thought, "They are right. I must not wear my hair this way." Several weeks later, I had my hair styled into a chin-length cut that I thought was more flattering.

More recently, I read about a highly-charged debate regarding the topic of long hear on women over 50. And I thought, "Yea--who says I can't let my hair grow at 50?" But then I thought, "But I kind of like my hair in this chin-length." Then I laughed; although maybe I should have cried. I realized what I was doing. I was being buffeted in the wind by the opinions of others from both sides! If this keeps up, I'll have to have a chin length cut on one side of my head and a wildly flowing mane on the other. (Hmmmmm....no...I don't think I want to go quite that far, although there really is no rule that says I can't!) When it comes down to it, why do we subconsciously feel we need permission for so much of our lives?

Ever see that scene in Runaway Bride where Julia Roberts sits down with several plates of eggs all prepared in different ways? It's one of my favorites. She's been so enmeshed in the lives of the men in her life that she has never taken the time to sit down and decide what SHE wants. So she does, she eats scrambled, fried, poached and boiled and decides she prefers Eggs Benedict. I think we all need to pause our lives now and then to step back and decide how we like our eggs. Or maybe we don't like eggs at all.

It's the rare moment in life when we haven't been subtly indoctrinated to follow the rules. Whether it's planning a wedding, growing a business or getting dressed in the morning. But it's not too late to unlearn the rules--to put on our multi-colored leg warmers, throw an offbeat all-about-us nontraditional wedding, redesign our business in a totally radical way...

..or let our hair down.