The colors of life

When I come home late at night—which has happened a lot this past month—there’s a luminous street corner about a block from the station which lights my way. A tree trunk entirely covered in red Christmas-lights and an old-fashioned lantern cast an orangy-red light unto the sidewalk, which, these days, is still blanketed in pink petals. In the moonlight, it feels like a discordant color study, like walking through magic.

Colors are important to me. I usually know when I get up in the morning if I want to wear red or yellow or blue or green: it’s an extension of how I feel, or how I want to feel. Since I have started needing glasses for everyday life, I have accumulated frames in most hues to match my mood. I know this about myself: I need whatever I wear at least not to clash.

In a random move, when I needed a new suitcase last year, I got a color I really don’t like, because it was significantly cheaper than the rest—other people also don’t like it much, I assume. The annoyance I feel when I use it is not quite offset by my feeling somewhat smug about the money I saved.

The truth is, I can’t quite bring myself to fully acknowledge that the color of my suitcase is more important to me than the fact that, regardless of color, the bag is functionally the same. Or put slightly differently: my kneejerk reaction is (still) to prioritize intellectual knowledge over experiential certainty. My brain knows the cheaper (Pepto-Bismol pink) bag is just as good as the (yellow) one I wanted, but my body does not. And maybe, just maybe, that means they are not actually the same.

I have written before about learning to listen to and then trust what my body already knows. Yoga helps me: once a day, I am in my body and know exactly what I need and want. But I also know that the world we live in is not arranged around our experimental expertise. We are taught to ignore our instincts and impulses and to prioritize that which we can reason ourselves to. We are taught to measure impact in numbers and worth in accumulated wealth. We are taught to ignore the beauty that is all around us all the time, the warmth we can’t quite quantify or hold.

That’s why this is so hard.

But little by little we can unlearn all that. Little by little, we can re-discover how to choose magic and love.