What Color Are You Today?
Has it ever happened to you to think about colors?
Not their names.
The way you feel them.
What does red awaken in you? Green? Gray? White?
If you close your eyes now and think only of the color green, where does your attention go?
Don't imagine a tree. Don't imagine grass.
Just the color.
Where does your attention settle?
In your mind? In your chest? In your stomach? In your throat?
Every time I do this, the same thing happens to me.
My attention settles in my chest. I never chose this consciously.
It just happens, and that's exactly where my curiosity began.
Not to understand what green means. But to understand what happens between us and colors.
Because biologically, color is not a quality that objects carry within themselves.
What we call "color" arises only when light reflects off an object, our retina captures that information, and the brain translates it into an experience.
The object is not red. The object is not green.
It only reflects different wavelengths of light. Color is born the moment our brain gives meaning to that light.
In other words...
Color is not only outside us. It is also created within us.
The more I read about this, the more I realized that almost every discipline has studied color in its own way.
Psychology studies how colors influence emotions, memory, and attention. We know they can affect how we experience a space or how we remember a moment, but the influence is not universal. It varies by culture, personal experience, and context.
Neuroscience studies how our brain constructs the experience of color.
Artists, however, understood this long before science explained it.
Goethe didn't see color merely as physics, he saw it as experience.
Johannes Itten built a large part of his theory on the emotional relationship that colors create.
Wassily Kandinsky believed that every color had an inner resonance, almost like a sound that isn't heard with the ears, but is felt.
Then I started noticing that almost every culture has given meaning to colors.
In the yoga tradition, each chakra is linked to a specific color. In other cultures, the same color symbolizes something completely different, and this made me realize that perhaps a universal meaning doesn't exist.
What exists is a relationship.
Between color. Body. Culture. And experience.
For a few weeks now, I've started playing a game.
I ask someone to think only of a color.
Don't tell me. Just think about it.
Then I don't look at the face. I look at the body.
Where does the attention go? Do the hands move to the stomach? Does the chest open? Does the breathing change? Does the head lift?
I'm not looking for the right answer.
I'm looking for a pattern.
I'm looking for the relationship between the body and color.
I also play this game often with myself.
When I think of green, my attention almost always settles in my chest.
It's interesting that in the chakra tradition, green is linked to the heart center. I don't take this as scientific proof. I take it as an invitation to observe, because that's what interests me.
Not to be right. But to learn to notice.
Then I started seeing colors outside this exercise too.
In the food that attracts me. In the clothes I choose without thinking. In periods when I suddenly dress only in black. Or only in white. In memories.
Because sometimes I don't remember a person's face, but I remember the color of the shirt they were wearing.
I don't remember the room. But I remember the light. I don't remember the day. But I remember the color it had.
The more I study colors, the less I believe they are simply something we see.
I think they are a relationship. Between light. Between brain. Between body. Between memory. Between culture. Between experience.
And then a question comes to me!!
If two people see the same wavelength of light, but experience it differently...
Are we truly seeing the same color?
Or does each of us live within a chromatic universe, a world of colors translated by our own brain, that we will never fully compare with anyone else's?
We've agreed to call a certain color "red."
But no one can know whether what I experience as red is the same experience you have. Perhaps this is why two people can watch the same sunset... and walk away with two completely different memories.
So I'm no longer as interested in the question:
"What does this color mean?"
I'm much more interested in:
"What does this color mean to you?"
Because maybe colors aren't just something we see.
Maybe they are a language. A language the brain translates. The body experiences. And each of us speaks in our own way.
And you...
What color are you today?