About Being Grey

It appears to me, that even the most opinionated individuals, at a late stage in life, would all of a sudden let out a “well, there are many ways to look at it”, or “that doesn’t bother me very much”, over things that I would have thought a long life would certainly made one form a strong opinion about. I shocks me in a way, disappoints me in another, but it also humbles me to think of what exposure to life – knowledge, experience and numerous human encounters – does to a person.

As a child, life is rather black and white; we learn about our world, what is right and wrong, good and bad. We start building up confidence and knowledge enabling us to ascertain our positions and opinions that on the one hand make us belong in a group and on the other form us into unique individuals.

But, paradoxically, the more we learn about our world, the more complex it turns out to be. The more people we meet, and the more we learn about the differences we inhabit, the more we realise that those previously so clearly defined black and white outlines start to blur around the edges.

As we grow older, not only does our hair colour shift to become grey – our understanding of our world appears to make a similar shift.

But there is an important subtlety here: Looking closely, the understanding isn’t really grey, that would make us into mushy nihilists. The definition of grey is rather filtered than blurred. In a black and white world, in a room defined by a big window, there’s a blackout curtain either fully open or fully closed, making the room either strikingly bright or completely dark. A mushy nihilistic room would replace the blackout curtain with a net curtain, making the room sleepy and without contrast, covered in a solid almost tangibly measurable grey film. If you would instead use venetian blinds to filter the light, the room would have darkness and light coexisting in the same space with sharp contrasts between the two, constantly changing depending on what goes on outside the window and inside the room. Greyness becomes the intangible ever-changing subjective interpretation between black and white. Greyness, allowing sharp opinion in a humble understanding of the full spectrum.