On my flight to Phoenix early Monday morning, the new PINK song, Turbulence, was playing as we began our descent and started experiencing, you guessed it, turbulence. At that moment, it reminded me of black and white thinking and how it was really just my fear that led me to think that way. I wanted clarity. I wanted assuredness. I wanted to do everything I could to avoid pain. In life. In love. In parenting. Even in death. I wanted things to be black and white because gray is tough. Gray is in between black and white. It's tough to know what to wear with gray compared to black and white. It's tough to know what to think when I don't think in black and white terms. Gray is just harder all the way around, so I tended to gravitate toward black and white.
I remember after I was working with my self-compassion coach for a couple years, I came to a session with her and told her I had read back over some of the things I wrote early on and my language was very black and white. Words like always and never flooded my writing. There was no room for gray. I had been SO scared, that's how I lived, in black and white terms.
I remember as a child making a deal with God when I was staying with my grandparents. I was sleeping on the sofa and I felt like I was going to throw up. I hated that feeling as much as anything. I still do. Now I know it was fear of not having control of a bodily function, but then all I knew was that I didn't want to perhaps make a mess if I couldn't make it to the bathroom in time or miss out on any fun with family coming the next day or make anyone else sick. So I lay there when I was maybe 7-8 years old pleading with God to keep me from getting sick promising I would be sooooooooo good from then on. Pleading. Begging. Just please, God, don't let me get sick. Now I think it may have been my mind, not my faith, that settled my stomach but regardless, to me, it's an example of how much I wanted control. How much I wanted to believe that God was black and white as I had learned, or thought I had learned, in church, from grandparents, etc. If I was good, God would be good to me. I would be safe. And later, that way of thinking led me to determine when bad things happened to me, I must be bad...just a really, really bad person. Inherently bad. Unredeemable.
I used to be scared of flying. But like most fears, I saw it in black and white. I said I wasn’t scared to die, I just didn’t want the feeling of falling. Flying was white, crashing was black. Flying was good. Crashing was bad. Falling scared the shit out of me. So in other words, the two controlled situations, even the one that caused death, were more acceptable than the one that was uncontrollable. I could accept walking onto an airplane I didn’t personally control and I could accept dying in a crash where the pilot lost control, but I feared more than anything the uncontrollable middle part of falling where no one had control.
It was easier for me to feel that what I believed was fact, the only truth rather than deal with the discomfort of opening my mind to another perspective. But I've learned when I open my mind, I don't have to be right and another person doesn’t have to be wrong. I can just be. I can accept that my past experience has led me to believe or feel or think whatever I do, but I can also see how others' past experiences have led them to believe or feel or think whatever they do.
Faith isn’t black and white to me anymore, and I have come to think that’s why it’s faith. It’s believing in something I cannot know with pure facts. It can be believing in a future state I have not experienced yet. It’s more of a feeling, than a fact. Perhaps that is why it’s so hard for me. Thinking with my brain made me feel safe. Feeling with my heart used to make me feel scared. So I chose thinking and therefore wanted everyone else to think like me so I could feel safe.
And while I wouldn't have had the courage to argue about what I believed, that’s why I think people tend to disagree adamantly and sometimes treat each other horribly because we would rather hold tight to “our” truth than feel the fear of any given situation. I've come to think anger, bullying and hate are really just the feelings of fear in their ugliest forms.
But self-compassion led me to another way of thinking. It led me to compassion not just for myself. It led me to compassion for all people. It led me to see gray as the color with the most clarity.
Gray is not fear. Gray is acceptance. Gray is I am not always right. Gray is uncertainty. Gray is living in the unsure present moment of real living. And gray became peace when I learned to stay in my heart, not my brain where fear is generated. Gray can be hard, but gray is acceptance of reality. Gray is what IS. Not what I want it to be. Not what would make me feel better or be easier. I learned I could continue to fight real life with black and white, in other words fear, or I could choose to face the uncertain reality of gray with love.
To me, gray is giving in to reality with love in all its forms. It is not giving in to fear which is black and white. To me, faith is gray. It’s admitting I don’t know everything. I do not have all the answers for everything. It’s accepting that bad things, sad things, tragic things happen. And it is not giving up hope in the future regardless of that fact.
If we had enough faith in love, that we cannot go wrong when love is what we believe in, we would be gray people who simply love no matter what. If we didn’t have to win. If we didn’t have to be right all the time. If we didn’t give in to fear. We wouldn’t need to hate. We wouldn’t need everyone to believe our truth, our black and white. We would understand life is gray. We would understand that we want to believe black and white because it allows us to feel comfortable believing in what is clear to us in our reality, what makes us feel safe. But life isn’t that. Life is messy and hard and painful.
I have learned that when I was living withholding the love that could help me survive the gray of the present, as well as the gray of the unknown future, I was alone. But I have now experienced how when I walk hand in hand with people, together in our gray, accepting that life is unknown and cannot be controlled no matter how hard I try, I am never alone. And that feels so much better, even in the most painful circumstances, it's survivable at its worst and its bliss at its best.
Terrible things happen every damn day in this world. We can keep fighting each other trying to stop them or we can control what we can control, which is only ourselves, by simply choosing love. Because love has more power to change this world than hate and resistance and fear ever could. Gray is loving, caring, and giving…give in to the gray of today, and stop giving in to fear. See the clarity that the gray acceptance of reality can bring.
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