'The World'

By Victor Epand

One of the longest surviving toys ever created is the crayon. Every single year over 2 billion crayons are manufactured.

Apparently, almost every child will work his or her way through with about 780 of these crayons by the time they are ten, and every child aged two to eight spends about 28 minutes every single day coloring with the help of these tools.

I'm not sure how people who work out these statistics managed to arrive at these figures. Ordinary people aren't always aware of the fact, how exactly the statistics can be 'about' 28 minutes. Surely, if the wording is 'about' half an hour - wouldn't that make more sense? Or, perhaps, having such a specific figure makes it sound more believable and precise. In any case, it does mean that we get through a huge amount of crayons.

Let's imagine for a minute that we deprived every single child in the world of their crayons, and stole every single crayon that was produced for an entire year. That puts us in possession of two billion crayons by the end of the year. Now, let's imagine that we lay these crayons end to end. Of course, we'd have to be quite sneaky or the children, who would still be sobbing with their sorrow at having been deprived of these artistic instruments, would pick them up and walk away with them.

But, we're in an imaginary world, so go in your imagination with me. We'll lay every
crayon one after another in a long
line. How far, do you think, our line would reach? Across America? Half way round the world? In fact, our line would manage to wrap itself right around the planet Earth - not once, or even twice, but a complete four and a half times!

Putting it another way, every decade enough crayons are produced to reach right from here to the moon, and if you consider the time since they first started manufacturing crayons, there would be enough crayons to complete a round trip to the moon and back five times!

So, what is our fascination with these crayons? They crack, snap, crumble and leave horrible marks on expensive furniture. Yet, somehow, holding a stick of color in your hand, you become the owner of a world not yet formed. The blank canvas in front of you hides a universe not yet born, but still drifting around in your mind just as your thoughts.

Like a god, you create a world out of nothingness, vibrant colors flaming their way across a sea of white. Castles, dragons, flowers and cute little houses with four windows and a door in the middle, complete with blazing sun and smoke, coming from the chimney. But, nevertheless, I don't know, why you'd have the fire on during what is clearly a hot summer day, but this is our reality, a world where we create the rules. The world, where we command existence with nothing more than a small stick of colour held together with glue.

We don't need to steal all those crayons. Every child has the power to reach the moon. And they only need one crayon to get there.