Use a Colour to Shape Your Future

Sometimes plans fail. And sometimes those plans were not holiday plans, but plans for your life. Plans for your dreams, for your goals and crucially, for yourself.

There was one summer where I found myself plan less. Like a Nasa Astronaut cut free from their cord, I was drifting. But not in a “I’m heading towards infinite blackness” way. A good way. The kind of drift a surfer follows when tackling a wave. A drift that leads you to growth. To ideas. Much like the one I was about to have.

My relationship with colour goes as far back as I can remember. I’m colourblind, which means counter intuitively I focus much more on colour than other people. You spend your life paying close attention to a thing everyone else gets to take for granted. Do we all even see the same colour anyway? How would an independent source even verify that? Isn’t it actually mad when you think about it? Anyway…

I knew I needed something to ground me for the rest of the year. July in Spain was a step in this direction, but something about relying on holidays to recenter yourself has always felt…expensive. You need something you can carry with you. And yet when I swam out to a local island with a friend, I happened to notice the colour of my swim shorts, aqua green, was the same shade as the rocks around us. There was a calm to the entire situation, like my inner state and the outer state were, for a brief moment, communicating with one another. Something about aqua green spoke to a part of me that was listening. And it dawned on me that picking this colour for the rest of the year could be a good idea. A colour that I could wield to bring my inner state to something I want. So on the swim back I made a choice — whenever things are uncentered, I’ll find a way to embody the qualities of this chosen colour. Silly, I know. That’s how it felt at the time. Too few times do we think of being silly as essential.

The irony is that green is a colour I struggle with greatly. I can’t properly see it, and that may have been the point. Whatever I saw was mine to decide on, uncorrupted by what everyone else agreed green was supposed to be. Aqua green, as I learnt, isn’t forest green or lime green. It’s closer to emerald. To me it feels like a colour born in Greece a thousand years ago on a hot day, made of some original substance we are all made from. And over that summer and year, I returned to aqua green. I started to feel calmer, and clearer, than I had in a long time.

Some words I used to describe aqua green: reset, calm, clean slate, life, beginning, centered, earth.

Choosing a colour felt like choosing my inner state. When things got crazy, I returned to aqua green. I bought aqua green t shirts. I looked for it in furniture, objects, walls, photos, films, people. There’s something about bypassing logic with something as undefinable as colour, it’s a strategy that silences that part of your brain obsessed with overthinking. In moments where you want to go back to old ways, you just look at your chosen colour and identify with the tenets and qualities of it.

If you find yourself stuck and want to be un-stuck, find a colour. Open a swatch of colours. Look around. What embodies who you are? Pick one that you like. It can be as simple as red for passion or yellow for being more positive. It could be blue represents new beginnings in foreign countries, or yellow represents lemons from that part of Italy your parents are from. It can be as complicated or simple as you like. What’s important is the practice of using that colour to keep polishing the mirror of you — a bit like after a shower when it gets all hazy. It’s a tool. Use it. Find a colour that speaks to you. Let it speak through you. And you may end up more yourself than ever.