Life is Just a Box of Crayons
A participant in my Enneagram class today gave me this short piece that she wrote. She is 86 and freely shares her wisdom. She agreed to share it with you.
A youngster whose needs are simple and who is easily satisfied, wants only the box of crayons containing the basic primary colors. Pure, innocent, and uncontaminated. The thick, chubby size feels just right in the small hand, and the smell transmits one, via the imagination, to places only experienced in their books of fairy tales.
The adolescent requires the biggest box of colors available. They refuse to recognize any limitations of the possibilities stretching before them and wanting to color the world with every possible combination. When the crayons are broken and worn down through overuse or abuse, the pieces are melted together into one big ball and the coloring of the world continued; sometimes creating rainbows and sometimes creating a big mess.
Wives and mothers no longer color the world with their favorite colors. Now the world is made up of the favorite colors of their spouse and children. Your own personal favorite color is kept buried close to your soul like some guilty secret. Almost like it would be wrong to indulge in their own preference.
Then in the solitude of old age, glorious old age, those favorite colors may be revisited. A new favorite may be chosen every day if that is what is wanted. If nobody else approves, that is their problem. There has been a graduation from the stifling requirements of trying to color everything to please the omnipresent “they.” How wonderfully euphoric it is to be able to have the freedom to examine every beautiful color, one by one or en masse, to explore all the possibilities. To enjoy or reject, depending on whatever their own current mood might dictate.
Thank you to Helen M. Knopf, for sharing your wisdom with our Enneagram class and granting permission to share this in a post on my blog. Helen is one of the 15 participants in our class at Oasis in San Antonio, a non-profit organization that promotes healthy aging through lifelong learning, active lifestyles, and volunteer engagement.