We are all emotionally colour-blind
Do you know what colour-blindness is like?
You see things, just not like everyone else does. Things have a different “tinge”.
It looks like we all are colour-blind, for the way we emotionally perceive the world and the people around us. Our emotional set-up, that was developed in our childhood and still is evolving now, colours the way we perceive others, and our relationships with them.
In some ways it goes hand in hand with the peanut theory: we “colour in” the blanks of what we don’t know. We project. It is a way to deal with the unknown.
The problem is that our colour-blindness is different to everyone else’s. We each experience the world in a slightly different, unique way.
So what we see as an inalienable and certain reality is in fact just our perspective, our take on “the Truth”. And what we try to do, is to communicate as if everyone around us could see the same thing, could see in the same way as we do.
But they can’t. We can’t. They can’t see things in our particular shade of colour-blindness, just as we can’t see things in theirs.
So what can we do?
Maybe realise that we are all emotionally colour-blind. That the shade of the world as we see it is not reality, but our own individual perception of it.
Maybe accept that other people’s perception is not less “right” than our own. That it is all about subjective perception, theirs and ours, each a unique shade of colour-blindness.
It’s bloody hard of course. To accept that what we each perceive as an objective reality is after all only our own projection, prejudice and perspective.
But if we hang on to that fiction, that we are right, that there even is a “right”, then that means the others have to be “wrong” if they don’t see the world in the same colour – and then what chance do we have of ever connecting?
