Have you ever imagine life without color? This question just struck my attention while walking along EDSA going to office. I used to see a lot of colors in the billboards, signage and even buses. Why do everything has to be colorful? We are so used to seeing colors that sometimes they have become something that we take for granted.
What is color? Out of the many vibrations reaching the earth a tiny octave is registered by the optic nerves. Our eyes respond to these particular vibrations with a reaction that we know as color. We can judge the worth of colors with the fact that most are coupled with our passion and diverse activities in life. White symbolizes peace, yellow symbolizes friendship, red is for both love & anger, green implies jealousy.
Colors can mean very dissimilar things – it is not that the colors themselves have meaning; its how we have culturally assigned connotation to them. For example, red means warmth because of the color of fire. Similarly, it means anger because of the increased redness of the face when it flushes with blood. Purple indicates royalty only because the only purple dye that was available for many centuries was very expensive.
I just want to share my meaning for every color. I hope you will not comment nor disagree because these are just product of my experiences and exposure to the world what we look forward to change the color. Red is for courage, orange for creativity and yellow for energy. For me, blue is for honor, green for optimism, purple is sophistication and gray is for intelligence. Endurance is color brown, elegance is color black while peach is white.
Again, color can be racially reliant, a very good example of this is that: although the color black means death in many nation, in China the color allied with death is white. There are also cases that colors are used to persuade people. Use shades of brown and green to relax people and say you are environmentally friendly. Use red to kick people into action. And so on.
You know what, McDonald’s, use red and yellow because red means fast and yellow means hunger simply because it is fast food business.
Remember also that meaning is what we create. It does not exist in the color itself and individual meanings may or may not exist in different cultures and individuals. Colors mean more to us than simply pigment. They are forms of energy, and as such speak to us and interact with us on a nonverbal level. In a very real way, life is color. Color affects every part of our lives, our emotions, our health. And what colors we like tell us who we are.
In spiritual side, we can also associate colors with different meaning. I can still remember our parish priest who always share and discuss the color of the altar or the different occasions. White means purity, black is for darkness, purple means royalty, blue is heavenly. Red represents sin, amber to glory, blue to peace and green is to life.
All colors have their own place. But what if our life had no colors? How would things look, and most importantly, how would our pictures look? Pablo Picasso once said: “There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.” Thus, it’s not really the colors that we have that matters . . . BUT THE COLORS WE BRING TO OTHERS!
Merong Forever 