Every Color in the Box

Three days before Christmas, I was standing in my kitchen looking at the center island that needed cleaning when my phone vibrated. I rarely pick up and even more rarely receive calls from anyone besides the kids' schools' administrators or spurious businesses on the East Coast. But that afternoon, when I glanced at the number, I actually responded. Then I went to my car to chat in quiet – Christmas equals busy house --  and spent forty minutes catching up with a college girlfriend, Corinna, whom I hadn't spoken with in two years. No, she hadn't butt dialed me (I asked). She sincerely wanted to know how my family and I were doing.

I love talking to Corinna – after 20 years, we still laugh at the same dorky, perhaps lame, jokes and can discuss everything  from health care to education to all sorts of -isms.  That day, conversation flowed easily from family to jobs to aspirations before she had one more story to tell, an otherwise benign anecdote that truly made me stop and reflect. Corinna said her oldest son had offered his three year old sister, Vi, a box of 64 crayons as an early Christmas gift and the little girl pulled each crayon from the box, lined them up on the kitchen counter (not straight, think rainbow), and declared she wanted to test every one, all 64 random hues.  As I sat in my Honda listening to the story, I was amused, inspired, motivated by metaphor. Why shouldn't Vi test every color in the box? And why don't we all? This wasn't just a funny tale of a little girl's creativity; this was a life lesson.

I finished the call and returned to the house which is, itself, a new color for me, and determined to begin testing hues -- doing things, learning things – that just might lead to the blossoming of an undiscovered part of myself.  Because if we don't encounter each color, if we don't examine them, analyze them, feel them, we won't know which colors we're most drawn to, which colors make us whole, which colors  feed our souls, which colors we can combine to create something new, something previously unimagined. We won't know when we're transforming into someone who likes new colors such as Asparagus (dubious name for a crayon but could be cool) or Bittersweet or Tickle-me-pink, who finds tranquility or excitement in colors she's never seen, who didn't even know that certain hues existed  (see Asparagus above) or that those colors make her who she is.

I haven't asked Corinna which colors Vi prefers but I will sometime. And then I'll ask her about her personal favorites and we'll laugh about the hues we were only beginning to detect in college and discuss how some have become more vibrant while others have been returned to the box. And then we'll talk about which colors we're going to experiment with next.

This is how we feel when we experiment with color.