Wednesday Weblog for February 23, 2022 |
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“Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered, but a maze of passages, through which we must seek our way, lost and confused, now and again checked in a blind alley. But always, if we have faith, a door will open for us, not perhaps one that we ourselves”
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Leading Off: Changes Lead Growth |
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The 'Shut Up and Color' Weblog resonated with many people, so I thought I'd keep crayons in the news. A version of this story originally appeared almost two years ago at the start of the pandemic, when most people first recognized that someone moved their cheese.
Everyone is in various stages of facing up to the reality of today's world where some things, and people, we held dear, are gone and things we are uncertain about surround us.
Change has been dramatic in the lives of many people, many organizations and many industries. Pfizer and Amazon are having trouble counting their money, and local restaurants have closed, and thousands have lost their jobs. It was a 'binary' pandemic: everyone and everything emerging from it is either better or worse, but not the same.
The first time many of us went through such a big change was when we graduated to pencils from crayons as our chief manual tools, but we mostly turned out ok. This story will help you remember why you use a smartphone instead of a crayon today, in spite of your best judgement and beliefs when you were in elementary school.
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From Uber Facts: The average child wears down 720 crayons by their 10th birthday.
For those of you with small children, or expecting to have small children, you might consider heading to a discount store and buying all 720 right now.
Grandparents and future grandparents: want to be even more of a hero than you are already? Buy crayons. Can you believe each kid uses that many crayons? I hope there aren't more kids eating crayons than I remember. Maybe there are a lot of ‘shut up and color’ lesson plans we didn’t suspect.
I used to spend a lot of time with crayons when I was younger and when I was a new parent. In fact, for those of you who are fascinated by my color-blindness, I learned I was color blind in kindergarten when I struggled with the blue and purple crayons.
In fact, for those of you who are fascinated by my color blindness, my son Joe is my official color-validator for all clothing and has been since he could talk. I won’t go shopping without him.
For no apparent reason, one day I started wondering about why there may not be a single Crayola in our house. Crayons are still easy to buy, I think they are inexpensive, and there are lots of books you can get to color, as well as walls to color. Why don’t I use crayons anymore? As a four-year-old, I couldn't live without them. Why don’t YOU use crayons anymore? (If you do, I'll keep your secret.)
Let me count the reasons for abandoning such colorful items.
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FIRST: CRAYONS HAVE A VERY LIMITED USE: Crayons are not good tools for the type of communication or artistic efforts we engage in as we grow.
They are not very precise, they leave a residue, they require a lot of paper for a small message.
They are not renewable. Can you imagine how large your briefcase or back-pack or handbag would need to be to hold all the crayons you'd need to get through the day?
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SECOND: CRAYONS ARE VERY SLOW: Most parents might sometimes wish they were even slower so that pages would take more time to color.
When we were younger, we weren’t in as much of a hurry because we didn’t have a next place to go or a next thing to do. I know I didn't have a wristwatch when I was four. Maybe five, but definitely not four.
Most of our day was decided for us, so we went along for the ride. Can you imagine how long it would take to write ‘War and Peace’ in crayons? (Note, I have never read War and Peace, but I know it is a long book, anyone who has read it is welcome to correct me.)
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THIRD: CRAYONS ARE VERY INEFFICIENT: Crayons have a doomed storage system. With the first stroke, capacity drops. While a crayon may start out fully wrapped at a robust three inches, it is misleading.
You cannot use all three inches of a crayon. You have to stop with a minimum of about a half an inch remaining and using it at that length takes work and super small hands and that is only if you are desperate.
Most crayons are tossed away with an inch or so left. Have you ever thought about all the 1" crayons that are perfectly usable but thrown away because they can't be gripped? Not to mention the ‘peeling the crayon’ hassle as it wears down. Once that peeling started and I couldn’t read the color, I was in real trouble.
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FOURTH: CRAYONS ARE VERY FRAGILE: If the crayon breaks because of pressure, you are left with two pieces to work it out or to throw out and your loss is more significant than at first glance.
Now you have two 1.5-inch crayons that you are going to pitch after using about 1/2 inch of wax. What a waste.
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A classic book, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson is an allegory about changes in our world and clinging on to the past when they change.
To a four-year-old girl or boy, Who Took My Crayons? is a better allegory and similar because both questions are backward facing instead of forward looking.
If you told a four-year-old they couldn’t use crayons anymore, they might think it was the end of the world and throw a tantrum or two. Is that what you're going to do when everything isn't the same in your world moving forward? If so, let me know YOUR tantrum techniques and I'll write about them.
The truth is we don’t use crayons anymore because they have limited use, are slow, inefficient, and fragile. Just as we have ‘outgrown’ crayons, we all will be leaving some other things behind in the next year as/if the pandemic wears down. We have outgrown some things and some things have outgrown us.
Change isn’t always good, but without change, nothing grows. Not organizations, not people, not toddlers. Little did you know that life after crayons had pencils, pens, markers, typewriters (for me), keyboards, tablets, and hand-held devices. Imagine what you would have missed if you were still insisting on using crayons?
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Guess what? The stark reality is that the pandemic not only moved your cheese, it took your crayons.
The more important question, in my mind, is not what was moved or taken, but rather what are you going to do about it? You have the rest of your life to figure out the cheese and crayons part, but time is passing you by if you spend it on those questions right now.
Optimistically, the pandemic will probably create the same type of efficiency leaps we’ve already experienced many times, and it requires everyone to repurpose skills, time and effort. You've done it before: your thumbs were critical at one time for holding crayons and you have successfully repurposed them to text on a smartphone.
So, as you go through the next year, as even more changes to your routine and lifestyle are made by you, for you and to you, as your cheese is moved and your crayons taken away, my suggestion is that you make your own choice: keyboard or crayon, stay the same or grow.
And remember that as a four-year-old, you were probably very successful at dealing with a new, crayon-less, normal, and you turned out ok.
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To submit your advice simply reply to this email and send it in. There is no guarantee it will be published, but I'll do my best to get the best ideas included. Even if it is not published right away, keep looking for it. |
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Submitted By: Carrie from Connecticut
My father always said it growing up and I’m sure he heard it from his father
“Take the time to do it right the first time - no cutting corners- because if you have to go back and fix it it’s going to end up taking more time than it would have if you just did it right to begin with.”
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Submitted By: Toni from Minnesota
…the best things often come from the worst of times
…this too shall pass
…you can’t change anyone else… only yourself
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Surprise Photo at the End (From Our Basement) |
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Joe's Positive Post of the Week |
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The Roll Call of states and countries where readers reside: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC, Wisconsin plus Canada, Spain, Conch Republic, Australia and the United Kingdom |
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Ed Doherty
774-479-8831
www.ambroselanden.com
ed-doherty@outlook.com
Forgive any typos please.
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