In Mithila painting the border is not decoration, it is the frame that holds the whole story. We put the fine line work there, the little fish and the lotus petals, because the border is what keeps the main figure from wandering off the paper. I have been filling these borders since I was a child, forty years at least, and yesterday while teaching one of the girls I finally saw something.

I always begin the border from the top left corner and work my way around. My mother did the same, and her mother. But yesterday the girl asked me, why you start at the corner, and I could not give her a proper answer. I sat with it and I realised the corner is where the two lines meet and it is the weakest place. The pigment pools there, the line gets thick, and the whole border looks clumsy right where the eye lands first. My grandmother would have known this. She probably started somewhere else on purpose and I never thought to ask her.

So now I am trying to begin from the middle of one side and work out to the corners, so the meeting place is not the beginning and not the end but somewhere in between. It is a small change and it feels like betraying my own hand. But the border is coming out cleaner.

Has anyone else found a habit they were taught that they only questioned after years? And when you changed it, did the work improve or did it just feel wrong for a long time?