The colours of your life

Which colour would you use to depict your life? Which colour would you use to describe the emotions you’re living? Or, again, which emotions do you prefer to colour your life?

We seem to be always on the quest for happiness, whatever this means to any of us. I have met people who don’t seem to be able to give a clear meaning to happiness; others give it such a strict definition that they appear to make it impossible to reach, if not for sparse moments. Some equate it to being always joyful and excited; others feel it as an equilibrium in the ups and downs of our daily adventures and corresponding emotional states. For some it is found internally; for others it depends on external conditions, people, and events.

While emotions and values such as happiness may appear so universal, their meaning and importance is varying and relative to the individual. I am not saying some would describe happiness as what would be described as despair by others: we’re not at these extremes. Nonetheless, it is the nuances that are essential.

Nuances are the elements that define our individuality, while still our being humans is very universal. Nuances show the biases of our lenses on the world within, and the world without. Nuances shape our perceptions, what we decide to see, as well as how we decide to think and to act. They impact our mindset and sense of responsibility in our life.

Make life black or white, and you get only two options. Think of the colours at your disposal as if they had been assigned to you, and you may feel your options are constrained. Use each colour by itself, and you will have more colours, but still plenty of separations.

On the other hand, you may mix colours, and get many more nuances: each of them different, but all very connected. Doing so you may still get only the colours that were assigned to you, but you would now be using them in your own individual way, to create options. You may even decide black and white is the perfect contrast to depict a moment in your life. But, it would be a choice, not a constraint: you can always go grey if you like!

Sometimes colours are not the ones we would like to use. Not by themselves. But, using them with other colours new possibilities open up. Sometimes we might have only one colour in our life, but we can still play with different pressures to create nuances in our experiences.

So it is with emotions. They might come onto us because of external events. They might not be the ones we prefer to colour our lives at any specific moment. Still, all of them in their separate appearances, give us plenty of opportunities to play with the nuances.

There are varying degrees of happiness, of sadness, of anger, of compassion, of love, of fear. The more we recognize the nuances, the more we’re able to play with them, and to make the drawing of our lives richer. The more we can find opportunities for nuances, the more we can see our own individual hands in our experiences.

It is not till we start playing with the colours, even when we didn’t choose them, that we begin realising we are painting the picture with our imagination and openness to nuances, and not just with the pencils we were given.

#perception #coaching #life