The World is Full of Rainbows
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Even if you can’t always see them.
The other day I saw rainbows (yes multiple). While sitting in the back seat of my friend’s Subaru, heading to the local swim spot. My glasses with polarized lenses made the world through the car’s windows a prism. The once black tar of the newly sealed driveway became a solid spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green and blue. The sunlight through the tree tops danced in technicolor. The world was something totally different, new, joyful, mine.
But then again, what I see is always mine. The world with my glasses on is just as real an experience as the world with my glasses off. The perspective of which, the color of which, is what I choose to make it.
Which is to say, what if what we see isn’t the only way to see it? What if the perspective you choose to take allows you to experience the world differently, to fundamentally show up in the world differently?
To dance in between the rainbows.
Or to remember that rainbows exist.
I used to be really frustrated by people that would tell me that happiness is a choice because it felt like bypassing the very real experience of living in my body, with a past that I was still processing, and in my mind with anxiety and low grade depression. In many ways these people telling me to be happy, sometimes at all costs, were just as limited in their view of the world as I was. They only wanted to see the world in yellow. I only wanted to see it in black and blue. Either way, we all denied ourselves the expanse of living found within every color.
Taking off the lenses you are currently wearing and seeing the world in a new way, a way your everyday prescription can’t afford you, is a deliberate act. It is a choice, sometimes an arduous, uphill choice, to see the world in a new way. Seeing the world in a new way, doesn’t mean it’s the only way either. It means the world does not have to be just yellow or just blue or just black and white. Today it could be rose colored, tomorrow sepia.
What your world looks like is up to you. You construct the experience by choosing the perspective. You take the light and story and turn it into something to make sense of. Such understanding could be critical and self deprecating, but it could also be loving and perhaps even fun.
So to that, you get to decide what glasses to wear. You get to decide what glasses to take off. Every perspective is yours to see through. What if today you chose to see a rainbow?
