My Favorite Color

Until recently, in fact, until today, I suppose I had no favorite color. If I preferred anything, it might have been some shade of blue… but really, colors are overrated. I have a dark green shirt that I prefer to wear to work, I’d probably have picked dark blue for a car, but I am happy with red. They are all just colors. None of them have any particular meaning, to me.


I was thinking a little bit about the divisions in our world. Everyone talks about right and wrong as if they were polar opposites. In a binary world – there are only two options. Off, or on. Right, or left. Democrat, or Republican. Black, or white.

For a long time, I lived in a gray world. Sure, there were lots of shades of that gray. But it was black, and white, and when you mix them, you get gray.

Somewhere in there, I discovered a rainbow. Imagine a world with no color. Just varying shades of gray. Years may go by, and you see all the details of your world in great clarity, you aren’t blind. But everything is black, or white, or somewhere in between. Then one day, you wake up, and there’s a rainbow. Imagine the awe, the surprise and wonder.

What can it mean? It’s something beyond comprehension. I wouldn’t have missed color because I never knew color existed. But what happens when you spy a rainbow, however fleeting that glimpse may be? It would turn your world upside down. You have discovered new - something that you never even knew existed.

But there’s a problem. A rainbow is not a color. Or is it? Actually, it is. It is light, as viewed through a prism. A million little prisms, a million little raindrops each acting as a prism. And black, or darkness, is simply the absence of light, of color.

I remember some of this from science class, and from art class, years ago. But all of that was just theory. Now I’ve discovered that it’s real.

From a grayscale world to a rainbow world. From the relative absence of light, to the reality of an abundance of light. Where darkness has its place but it doesn’t drown out all else.

Now, if only those right and left-oriented people, those politicians, the people too concerned about absolute right and absolute wrong, that believe it’s black and white, if they could only see the rainbow, they might come to realize that it’s all good. We do NOT live in a black and white world. Black and white DO NOT EXIST. Black is the absence of light, and white is just light that includes all the colors of the rainbow.

If they’d get off their duffs and quit worrying about ones and zeros, get out of their tunnelvision and grayscale economies, they might realize that it’s not worth all the bother and fuss and hype and they might learn to just BE. They might learn that it doesn’t have to be right or left. Black or white. Democrat or Republican. It’s ALL good. At least, there is some good, in all.

Imagine a world where the politicians would quit bickering about black and white, and take a breather, and look again at the rainbow that’s all around us, and see that there are other solutions to their problems besides infighting, back-stabbing, bickering, shouting. It isn’t about ones and zeros, it’s about 2’s, 3’s and 4’s, and A’s, B’s, C’s.

Roy G. Biv would understand. It’s all good.
 
BTW, Light (aka the rainbow) is my favorite color.