What does the exclamation“What a grey day!” conjure up for you? Something bleak? Something a bit miserable, bland, boring? Something colourless and interesting?
Grey gets a bit of a bad reputation I think. Now let me be clear I love colour, and I’ll share some gorgeous colours tomorrow, but look at this first photo. I took it on a visit to the South of France. It’s the Mediterranean coast. It was a grey day. Blanket, thick grey cloud covering the sky. But it was beautiful. And the light was beautiful.
I can gaze at this image for ages and lose myself in it. I love the curves, the gentle slopes, the shades of grey, dark in the foreground, bright on the horizon. It draws me in, calms me and delights me.
There’s nothing really “clear” or “sharp” about this image and I think that explains a lot about its power. We are drawn to mystery. Curiosity is one of our core features. It’s a characteristic with which I identify strongly. I love it when something catches my attention and my enthusiasm for knowledge and understanding start to surge.
I love to be fascinated. I love to be intrigued. The world brims with questions, puzzles and mysteries to me.
I love to wonder in this wonderful world.
One of the things I loved about medical practice was that every single patient would tell me a unique story, a story which stirred my curiosity. I always wanted to understand, to know what they were experiencing and to explain why.
And here’s the thing….knowledge and understanding were never an endpoint for me. They were a beginning. I loved to make a diagnosis, to be able to see and understand a certain illness. But diagnosis was a starting point. It was the beginning of something. It opened the door to finding the underlying causes, the factors which were contributing to this current suffering, and to finding the best ways to help.
Knowledge and understanding are not goals, in the sense that they are not destinations. I get frustrated with the insistence on outcomes, on measured end points, because life is not a series of end points. It’s a process, and ongoing, complex, multiply connected flow.
I love that life is curious and unknowable and that every day is filled with wonder. The desire to explore and discover is present all the time. Isn’t that fabulous? Isn’t that delightful? Isn’t that amazing?
Heroes Not Zombies 
Is grey quite the right word for a view and scenery like that? Might silver be better? We get a lot of grey days here in Argyll, and lots of people might well dismiss such days as typical rotten Scottish weather, but if I look out at the Argyll countryside on such days and think “Silver!”, I find that it looks just as fabulous as it does when the sun shines which actually it does a lot in Argyll.
And how come you’ve posted a blog about “grey” without mentioning “pink”?
Well said – silver it is!
Ah, search “grey and pink” on my blog!