When I picture the night sky, I imagine darkness. I picture a dark veil in the sky disrupted by speckles of light that are stars. I insinuate the world to be silent, almost lifeless in nature.
Yet today, as I stepped on to the basketball court on a sunny day in NorCal, I saw so much more. The sky itself transitioned from a dark navy blue to black, with those speckles of light varying in luminosity and size. The world around me was still very much awake, dogs were being walked and runners were persistent. It was noisy—I heard crickets, frogs, children playing on the playground. There was so much color.
In that moment I asked why? Why did I imagine the world to be so bleak? I had seen, no I had experienced all of this before. Yet my imagination didn’t form this image.
I think this is true for a lot of things in life. Often we assign labels to things and assume them to be simple. A kid who struggles in class is labeled as simply stupid. If we don’t enjoy a book or a movie we say its simply bad. If we fall short of our goals we simply label our entire effort as a failure. But the kid who struggles has his strengths. The media we consumed has attributes that appealed to us underneath our generalization. That failure changes us in ways that have prepared us better for the next adventure.
This ideology is best known through the mindset of “view the glass as half full.” But I think we’ve buried the significance of the statement in making it a common phrase. The weight behind those words is everything, because drawing appreciation from everything is essential for our happiness. Critical for our growth.
A big critic of depression is that many whom suffer from it fail to find the positives in their lives. That is EXACTLY it. Together we must realize the positives. Together we must make appreciation the norm. At the surface level everybody knows this to be true, but it’s time to make it a practiced reality. So this is my effort to start IMAGINING IN COLOR.