Careful

Colors of Life

Deccan Herald, Date: 10-Mar-07

In the course of every human beings life journey, there are certain events that stand out as milestones. Some of them leave happy memories and we associate them with good things, some don’t and we associate them with bad things.

As we progress in life, we try to reflection that part of our life that has passed and tend to simplistically ask ourselves, "what if the bad events had not happened?" or "how different would life have been if the bad events could be undone?" In a way, we try to segregate our lives into good and bad and we wish to think that good and bad are two distinct colours of our life. But we all know that it doesn’t happen that way. Rather, should it happen that way? While the answer need not necessarily be specific or closed-ended, we could certainly take some hints from Mother Nature to understand her way of doing things.

Mankind has always associated the vagaries of life with the variety of colours. We relate red with anger, blue with sadness, green with jealousy, white with peace and pink with good health.

However, in nature’s scheme of things, there is a very subtle difference when it comes to the transition from one colour to another.

If you closely observe the colour patterns of any natural object, you will observe that the transition from one colour to another is never distinct or clear-cut. It is always gradual and seamless. For example, you may observe that the colour of the tree leaves is green and that of its branch is brown, but you will never be able to locate the exact point where green ends and where brown starts.

Similarly, a ripe mango may be yellow in colour, but the change from green to yellow is gradual and is never distinct. Of course, the best example is the change of colours in a rainbow. And this is exactly where Mother Nature teaches us an important life lesson. Unlike in artificial or manmade objects, where change from one colour to another can be distinct, doing the same trick to natural objects is not possible.

Applied to our lives, the good and bad colours of our life are seamlessly intertwined with each other. It is futile to even think of segregating our lives into good and bad. While we may wish to portray only the good colours in our life to others, we need not estrange or disown the bad ones. Nature tells us to accept the good with as much grace as the bad.