Every Vibrant Shade of Gray

On any given day, we’re all doing the best we can. We’re all showing up and putting forth the best effort we can muster. Some days we’re proud of ourselves, and those are really good days. Other days we’re not, even though we probably did everything we could bring ourselves to do. Those are the less good days.

And then there are the days where we do our best but it never feels like enough. Like no matter how hard we try, we just won’t measure up. Those are the days of impossible choices. When even if you follow all the rules, you still feel like you can’t do anything right. When you are so unsure that all you can do is hope that you are doing enough.

Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t. Maybe you’ll know one day. Or maybe you’ll never know. So you take a deep breath and swallow your doubt and uncertainty. Then you grab hold of your hope and let it pull you forward. Because there’s probably more than one way to do this something that’s in front of you. And you considered as carefully as you could before you jumped in.

This is how we head into the unknown and uncertain future. Maybe we’re timid, slowly inching forward one little step at a time. Or maybe we’re running at full speed. But regardless of our pace, we’re steady on our own two feet. We can’t see the trail in the fog all around us. But we hold our head as high as we can as we walk into a world filled with every vibrant shade of gray. We’ve got our hope that we’re going the way we want to; and we hope that’s enough.

Sometimes we feel like we’re alone. Like we’re the only one unsure as we explore all the gray around us. We feel alone because when we do come across other people, they all have their heads held high and they look so steady on their feet. We think everyone else must have it so much more together than we do to walk around that confident. And we forget all about how we made ourselves brave enough to enter the fog.

The future world is full of gray, and every shade we see is exquisite and vibrant. Each day ahead is filled with countless chains of choices we haven’t made yet. Like a black and white photograph or a fresh page in a coloring book. If we needed to see how things would fill with color before we walked forward, we’d never take any steps at all. 

We can only imagine what the picture will eventually look like when it’s colored in. But because we don’t really see exactly what’s coming until it’s happening, we learn to take the uncertainty in stride. Time teaches us that our imagined image will never be exactly right. What we thought we saw coming? That was our hope.

Hope that you are making the right choices for you and the people around you. Hope that you are always choosing to do the right thing. We’re not relying on blind faith though. We take a deep breath or two while closing our eyes, and we wait for the tug. That’s what we rely on. The tiny pull from the needle of our own compass. The one that helps us take the next step ahead.

Our stories are messy and complicated. The trails we carve draw winding maps with lots of zigzags and offshoots. But the unknown and the uncertain are what make stories compelling. We are pulled in by the anticipation of what could happen. We steady ourselves and walk forward with our heads held high, filling our stories in with color as we go.