Live Inspired!
Inspirational Color Quote of the Week: Color Brown Interesting Perspectives “Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.” --Kent Nerburn(author) What do you think? As an award-winning author interested in American culture and spirituality more broadly, Mr. Nerburn gives us a lot to think about. For starters, his is a different perspective. ”We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.” Well at least speaking for myself, that’s not my usual way of thinking. When things don’t work out the way I want, my first thought is some version of, there must have been something additional I could have done. How could I have worked harder? What did I miss? So let’s appreciate it: we don’t always have control. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way we want, and sometimes things do come down to that which we don’t expect, even to chance. There’s bad weather so the crops take a hit. Economic circumstances change in ways that couldn’t have been predicted. Some relationships just aren’t meant to work out, and sometimes as hard as we try, we’re simply operating as underdogs. We can’t always make it happen. Nonetheless, we can sure put in the effort, and we can give our goals our best shot! What’s important to us deserves nothing less. Ok, we may run into unforeseen obstacles, and achieving a goal may take longer than we expect, After all, it’s a balance between going for what you want and going with the flow of what you can’t impact. There’s a role for chance, but you’ve got to act as if your best shot is going to get you where you want to go. And one other point. What about building in some learning from the things that don’t work out? Using the metaphor of color, perhaps we can even deepen Mr. Nerburn’s ideas. Think about it. is brown his favorite color? Probably not so much. He’s using the color to describe things in to-say-the-least a pretty negative way, characterizing real despair and desolation--fields presumably laying fallow and “brown” and being made hot by the intense august sun. A good description of how disappointment can make us feel. But what if once we move past that upset, there’s a different way to see the world? What about the idea of learning and moving on from those times when we get discouraged? After all, brown is also a color of the earth. In shades, it can be wonderfully warm and rich. It can provide a great foundation/background for other colors, and it can represent mellowness and stability. What if the color itself can remind us about productive ways to come back from disappointment. We can learn. We can grow. We can keep things positive, and we can make things better. And above all, as Mr. Nerburn encourages us, we can cultivate that quality of gentleness (also reflected in the color brown) with ourselves and others. How do these ideas resonate with you, and what are one or two actions you might want to take in the next day or so on that basis?
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Live Inspired! Inspirational Color Quote of the Week: Colors Blue, Green and White What You Need? “Colors. Would it be green or blue today? Maybe white—my favorite. A dark voice in the back of my mind offered no color at all as an alternative. I smothered that voice. The days of no color were simply too hard to bear. I needed color today.” --―Julie Hockley (author, Crow’s Row) What about you? What color(s) do you choose today? Blue or green for some calm? Red or orange for some passion? White because it’s neutral and goes with everything? Perhaps color isn’t something you feel you need right now? What I like about Julie Hockley’s thought (in addition of course to her emphasis on color) is her focus on what she needs and therefore on what she wants around her. Think about it. You get up in the morning. You’re in a hurry, and you pick out the first piece of clothing in the wardrobe you find. You’re happy there’s clean stuff in the closet. There isn’t much time before it’s time to leave the house. Voila, you just leave. Hmm, not much time to think about colors, let alone to slow down for 5 minutes to take stock of other things you might want or need. The character in Julie Hockley’s novel for me gets it about right. No question she’s in touch with what she needs. Thinking through her choices, she’s consciously figuring out what makes her happy. For her, it’s not about being engaged in some intellectual or abstract exercise. There’s real emotion in the endeavor. Though there’s a “dark” inner voice suggesting otherwise (sound familiar?), she knows she can’t bear to have no color; she feels strongly aboutit, and she lets us know that white is her favorite. Once you get in the habit, you can even fine-tune the process. Maybe you choose certain colors for your clothes but others for the objects around the house? Colors you want to paint the rooms? And of course it doesn’t have to be just about color. When you’re focusing on what you need, there’s a whole range of other senses you might want to consider and a diverse set of needs you might want to satisfy. Do you need different things in different situations? What a great idea on a regular basis to ask these basic questions. Think about all the times we make things so complicated we just go round and round and can’t come up with answers, or think about the times we forget to ask ourselves in the first place. Maybe focusing on what we need is really simpler than we think, and for starters, maybe it comes down to questions about what color is going to make us most happy in any particular moment. How do these ideas resonate with you, and what are one or two actions you might want to take in the next day or so on that basis? Live Inspired!
Inspirational Color Quote of the Week: Colors Puce, Lavender, Blue, Periwinkle Blue and White Favorites “My favorite name for a color is “puce”… It’s a hideous color. But I love the word… But my favorite colors are lavender, purple, periwinkle blue, and white.” — Elizabeth Taylor (actress/entertainer) What do you think? Well, it’s not all about thinking, is it? Sometimes it’s simply about what you feel/like. So what’s your favorite color and how come? What else would go on your list of favorites? People? Places? Thinking about favorites (or even just very strong likes) is important because we don’t enough focus on what’s positive and what’s most meaningful to us. We like to go negative. We like to go with what hasn’t worked. But they say what you focus on expands; so it follows that if you focus on the positive, you’ll find ways to get more of it. And for the most part, Elizabeth Taylor is setting the example. Ok she isn’t mincing words when she lets us know she thinks the color puce is “hideous.” Well, as part of another conversation altogether, let’s acknowledge that strong feelings, regardless of their direction, are important to voice! Mostly though, she’s keeping the focus positive. She likes puce because she likes the name, and she lets us know that she likes a range of other colors. At the same time, she’s pointing us toward another important thought, one that sometimes gets lost in translation and one that we don’t always want to acknowledge. She’s reminding us that even when we’re focusing on things we like and those we truly count as our favorites, it’s not about being Pollyanna positive, and it’s not always 100% the way we want! each of us (whether we focus on them or not) can generate our list of favorites; let’s say favorite people. Does that mean that those individuals 100% satisfy our needs? Does it mean that we like absolutely every last thing about each of those individuals, never feeling upset or irritated even with our best friends? Hmm, it’s ok to like something a lot and still acknowledge that things aren’t and don’t have to be completely perfect? And there’s the other side of the coin too, which can be even harder to accept. Among things we don’t like, it may not be all negative. I am sure we can all think for example of individuals we strongly dislike or disagree with. Not hard to come up with that list, is it? But think for a minute. Does that mean that everything about each of those individuals is “bad?” Does that mean they have absolutely no redeeming qualities or no attributes we respect or admire. If you think about it, that’s probably not the case. You completely disagree with the views of hypothetical Person X, but she is thoughtful and articulate about expressing herself. Person Y talks too much and gets angry too easily, but he is also unusually kind and generous to his friends. By taking time to “analyze” puce and to separate the color (which she thinks is hideous) from the name (which she loves) Elizabeth Taylor, even if she probably wasn’t trying to, is teaching us a couple of important lessons. Hey, there isn’t always an all good or an all bad, and realizing that can truly shift and change the nature of our relationships, making them easier to handle. And there’s one last point too. On what are you basing your judgments when you label something as negative or positive/bad or good, and how much thought has gone into your assessments? We can’t know what image was in Elizabeth Taylor’s head when she decided puce was a hideous color. After all, puce is a combination, in shades, of colors including purple, brown and red. Well the colors Elizabeth Taylor says she really likes include purple and periwinkle (a blue/purply color). A little more time and you never know: as a color which in some shades can come pretty close to some colors she really likes, Elizabeth Taylor might just let us know that puce after all isn’t so bad. And with the groundedness of a color like brown linked to the passion of purple and red, in the end, there sure are a lot of reasons to focus on things that are our favorites and things we really like. How do these ideas resonate with you, and what are one or two actions you could take in the next day or so on that basis? |
AuthorI am a Life Coach, a Color Wisdom Card Practitioner, and yes, even a Professor (political science, State University of New York at Albany). I use the Color Wisdom Cards to support clients in exploring priorities and taking concrete actions to stay on track with the goals they set. Because in my own life I have overcome a lot of self-doubt, I want to work with people towards more confidence and self-empowerment. You can do it! What is it you want to do? Categories
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