Some twenty or so years ago, my mom and I were walking through the now-defunct Mervyn’s department store at one of the malls here in Albuquerque.
“This is terrible,” Mom said. “It’s dead in here.”
That’s what she always said when color was lacking or lighting didn’t let the color come through– it was dead.
Mom included color wherever she could. There are multiple photos me wearing pink footy (as we called them– not Australian football) pajamas which were then passed onto Denise. Karen had a pink bedroom, mine was pink, Brian’s was blue. My parents had a gold bedroom. I’ve talked about the rainbow bathroom before.
She didn’t do color as loudly as the senior citizen woman I saw in Lowe’s recently wearing eighties fluorescent leggings with an equally fluorescent top, but she used enough color that you definitely wouldn’t call anything she wore dead.
Life is meant to be colorful, to be bright, to be sunny, especially because we’re often fighting challenges and darkness without ourselves and our worlds.
Which is why I choose to wear color, to decorate with color, and encourage everyone to include color wherever they can. We can't ever get enough of the good vibe it makes us feel.