The small box works just fine
I was scrolling the other day and came across a man named Robert Arnold on TikTok. He was talking about crayons. His verbal essay stopped me cold. He was describing a 128-count box of Crayola crayons. As a kid, that wasn’t just a box. That was success, and the fancy names of the colors were mind-blowing.
He talked about growing up in “the humble middle.” That was me. If we had 16 crayons, it was a good year. He described his crayons like mine as “worn down, paper peeling, flattened on one side from pressing too hard.”
Then came the part that really landed. At the end of every school year, he noticed that the kids with those big, beautiful boxes still had most of their crayons. And they were still perfect and most were untouched. He said, “All that possibility just sitting there. Because the truth is, we draw most of the world with the same dozen shades. The ones you reach for without thinking. The ones that wear down because they’re actually doing the work.”
As a musician, I’ve lived with that truth every day. There are only 12 notes in Western music. Twelve. Every song ever written was created from the same 12 tones. This limited number of notes isn’t the enemy. It’s what makes it possible.
Writers know it too. Most of us move through life with a few thousand vocabulary words. Even Shakespeare, who had thousands more than most, didn’t invent a new alphabet. He used the same letters as the rest of us. He just pressed harder on the ones he had.
That’s the game.
We’re all working from a finite set. Time. Energy. Talent. Even birthdays come in a limited run. No extensions. No extra edition waiting in the wings. When it’s done. It’s done. That’s what gives the years their weight.
Same goes for the rest of it. Clothes in the closet. Tools in the drawer. Opportunities in front of us. It’s not about how many we have. It’s about which ones we actually use and how we use them.
But our American culture pushes the opposite message. More is better. Bigger is success. Fill every drawer with the 128-count version of life. And yet, when we’re really honest, most of those colors will sit there intact. Untouched. Unused. Arnold called them “potential that never quite turned into anything real.”
Look, I’m not arguing for deprivation. I’m not pushing for having less just for the sake of having less. Kids don’t need 128 crayons to make a tree. They’ll take brown and green and figure it out. They always do. That’s part of the beauty of being a kid. The limitations are the game.
What I am saying is a meaningful life should never be about the size of the box. It should be weighed by what got made.
The real colors that matter aren’t printed on the label. They’re things like love, decency, patience, curiosity, forgiveness. Things that require showing up when it’s inconvenient. Staying when it would be easier to walk away. Trying over and over when something doesn’t work. Those are the crayons of life that get worn down. They are the ones we should hold onto until there’s nothing left but a little stub.
And that’s not because we ran out of options. It’s because we made something real with what we had. And if you’re honest you’ll admit that the extras we were told would somehow complete us usually go unused. That’s just human.
So, remember this: To paraphrase Robert Arnold, we need to learn to use what we have and love what we use. Most of all, however, don’t confuse the size of the box with the beauty of the picture you’re making. Because in the end, no one remembers how many crayons you owned. They remember the picture you left behind and whether you had the courage and the passion to wear your crayons all the way down to nothing.
Nick Jacobs is a resident of Windber.