Black, White and 67 shades of Grey! #ThrowbackThursday

I have been blogging for more than a decade now. On and off and mostly for fun. So I thought of starting this #TBT series where I share old posts and my early memories related to blogging. I am still experimenting what works and so every TBT post you see could seem different!

This post is from December 2008. In here I am talking about shades of like. All of them from Black, White and 67 shades of Grey!

Last Friday, on the way back home I was tuned to a radio station as usual. The topic being discussed was – are there any blacks or whites in life? Or are there only shades of grey? (the number 67 comes from the show’s host by the way) The moment I heard it, I was like Black and White in life? Is that even possible? I don’t think so. Allow me to explain –

 Black is the absence of light. Light now can be energy, emotions, feelings… all manner of things possible. This would make white a combination of everything. All feelings, all emotions… maybe I take the theory a bit too far. If you consider light symbolic of all things positive, then the whites become a culmination of happiness, elation, ecstasy, joy… sheer bliss, if I may say so. And black is the exact opposite – hate, anger, sadness, misery. Now with this distinction clear, try to fit the events and things in your life into these 2 brackets. Can you? If you say yes, look at the thing again. Was there not a single thing to tarnish your happiness in all the whites? I bet there was. All good things come at a price and bearing the price adds black to your perfect white resulting in… you guessed it – GREY! Look closely enough at the blacks, did nothing good come out of it? Not even the slightest bit? No, then change eyes! Look at it from someone else’s perspective and you’d detect a white… no matter how tiny that speck is, it renders the black grey. A mixture of black and white – grey! The shades may vary some resembling white and some black and yet there’d be scores of others that are close to neither. They tread on the fine line between good and evil as we know it and could fall on either side depending on the person’s vision.

 Speaking of myself, I learnt early on that there are no blacks and whites. But putting that into practice in life – well, that was another story altogether! Ironically, when I finally did, I emerged a new person. Whenever I look back, I attribute my metamorphosis to this. An acceptance of the greys in life as they were and of my own inability to change them. You wouldn’t imagine the kind of change that came over me then. I became a lot easier to get along when I let go of the hang ups and made a lot more friends. When you accept that you are not perfect, you are at peace with yourself. When you accept that no body is perfect, you are peace with the world. I found my peace when I accepted the greys in people around me and that made it much easier to breathe. This new life was much better than teenage angst which we all go thru. I remember one of my teachers saying that as teenager’s we are caterpillars wrapped in the cocoon. We go thru a period of struggle with ourselves, trying to understand who we are, what we want, what we expect from ourselves. Once we are thru, we emerge as beautiful butterflies… quite a poetic way to put it I said, but doesn’t happen in real life… how wrong I was!

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