Carpe Crayons

Yesterday, I wrote a little about the joys of coloring with my grandchildren.  As I look back on my life, I realize that that is a joy I shared with my girls; it is a joy that my parents shared with their grandchildren; it’s joy that I remember: especially sitting at the kitchen table at Granny Kuhn's; It's a joy that it is, well, timeless.  I can even imagine the first caveman grandpa handing his grandchild a piece of charcoal and saying, “Ugh, Want have fun? Let’s draw on walls!” 

The history of the crayon is not entirely clear. According to Wikipedia, The word "crayon" dates to 1644, coming from (chalk) and the Latin word creta (earth).  Pliny the Elder (sounds like a guy who would play with crayons), a Roman scholar, was thought to describe the first techniques of wax crayon drawings.

This method, employed by the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and more. Contemporary crayons are purported to have originated in Europe where some of the first cylinder-shaped crayons were made with charcoal and oil. Pastels are an art medium having roots with the modern crayon and stem back to da Vinci in 1495.

Turn the coloring book pages a few hundred years and we come to Edwin Binney and his wife Alice.  I don't know if they were grandparents, but they came with their famous Crayola brand of crayons (The French word for chalk, craie, with the first part of oleaginous, the oily paraffin wax used to make the crayon).

The rest, as they say, is history.  Very colorful history!

Back in the days when I worked in advertising and marketing and had my own office or video editing suite, I always had a box of Crayola 64 Crayons (with the built-In sharpener) on my desk.  Why?

I noticed what the great storyteller Robert Rulghum observed:

 “What I notice is that every adult or child I give a new set of Crayolas to goes a little funny. The kids smile, get a glazed look on their faces, pour the crayons out, and just look at them for a while....The adults always get the most wonderful kind of sheepish smile on their faces--a mixture of delight and nostalgia and silliness. And they immediately start telling you about all their experiences with Crayolas.”  — Robert Fulghum,  All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten.

So, my Carpe diem challenge today is to pick up a box of crayons and have them at the ready for both children and adults -- and for you, as you make very colorful goals and create your own Carpe Diem Life Map.  Coloring is, as children remind us,  something we can all do to the best of our ability — no matter what that ability is.  Coloring makes us happy.  Coloring makes us completely present.  Coloring allows us to dream in delightful spaces somewhere between dreams and reality.

“We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box.”  — Robert Fulghum

Carpe Diem Life — In brilliant color!
David Kuhn