When I was a kid, I used to wonder if everyone saw colors the same way. Was the color blue seen the same by everyone? How would we know if it wasn’t?
Much later, I had a sweater. It was woven from multi-color yarn and it was loose and comfortable; it became my favorite. Typical of favorite garments, after a few years it began to show its age.
One evening we were getting ready to go out to some friends’ house for dinner and my wife asked me what I was going to wear. I told her I planned to wear my favorite blue sweater.
She asked, “What blue sweater?”
I said, “You know, the blue pullover, the crew neck that I like.”
She said, “You mean that green one?”
I said, “No, the blue one.”
“What blue one? Show me.”
I pulled the sweater on and said, “Ta-Da!”
She said, “That’s a green sweater and you’re not wearing that ratty old thing out of the house.”
I was immediately interested in our differing descriptions of the sweater—the color, that is; it was definitely ratty.
I went into the bathroom and looked at the sweater in the mirror. Multi-color it was, but it seemed predominantly blue to me.
I wanted to get to the bottom of this blue-green controversy so, to further my research, I went to our teenage daughter’s room. I asked her, if she had to use just one color to describe the sweater, what would it be.
She pondered a few seconds and said, “I suppose brown, or maybe rust. You’re not going to wear that tonight, are you?”
The only thing I was sure of was that I was not going to wear that sweater to go out that evening.
Some years later, though, I became certain of this: to a greater or lesser degree, we all experience existence—life—each in our own unique way.
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