Most things in life are truly shades of gray, and they are beautiful for being gray.

I went out to watch the sunrise and some might think it would be disappointing because it was overcast and gray, not me. In the fall we get more fog in the mornings, it is a normal thing. In the fall the air cools quicker than the ocean and as such the air tends to pick up more moisture. Evidently, that additional moisture then hangs in the air as the breeze blows it inland. I am by no means a meteorologist but I have stayed in a Holiday Inn Express, all kidding aside I have no idea why that happens I just know it does. On this morning, I was pondering the shindig that Bride and I will be throwing on Thanksgiving – 14 people is still a bit intimidating for us. I am thankful that I have the rest of week off, vacation time had to be taken or possibly lost and I ain’t losing no vacation time. I also was thinking hard about some additional turmoil in my Texas family life. When I arrived at the beach today I was again surprised by how brightly lit the beach is when it is foggy. The lights from hotels, homes and businesses reflect off the low hanging clouds and light the beach up, almost as if it were day time, it is a weird phenomenon. As I watched the sunrise, I received only 2 minutes to see the sun. It was a dim red globe, barely visible shooting up from the horizon and into the low hanging clouds.

In that moment, I began to ponder why folks may have problems with coming out on a day like today, foggy and overcast because there is never any real colorful light display. Usually when it is not overcast there is a magnificent display of lights and colors that is different every day. As much as I love that show, I love equally the gray and colorless days sitting in my plastic chair. For me it does not matter if it is sunny, overcast, raining, cold, warm or foggy I love coming out here in the mornings. This morning, even though the sand was lit up when I looked out to the ocean it was pitch black – VERY DARK. It was beautiful to watch going from pitch black through shades of gray all the way to blue gray. So here I was back to shades of gray again. I again started thinking about the current family turmoil swirling around a Christmas get together. I know that most of life is lived in various shades of gray. There are very few things that are truly black and white, other than our moral and ethical foundations. For most of us, our moral and ethical grounding comes from our belief systems, the 10 commandments, the 5 principles for the Hindu and the 10 precepts for a Buddhist and the Decalogue for my Muslim friends. I have obviously oversimplified those belief systems into one sentence but you get my point. Those are the only things in my life that are truly black and white, everything else – shades of gray.

Earlier in my life, I summarily dismissed the beauty of all the various and subtle shades of gray. I suspect that may have had something to do with serving 10 years in the United States Navy and the ships were gray. There was also a horrible saying, “haze gray and underway” that was used when discussing what the ship was doing. Basically, it meant we were always gone. It took a long time for me to come to grips with the gray, the gray of all kinds. The gray days, the gray areas that always pop up in relationships and work and every other part of our lives. They can be a depressant if we are not careful and if we can not see gray for what it is, just another form of beauty it can cause problems for us. Those gray areas are where we all live our lives, there are always bright sunny days in our lives, literally and figuratively. There are many, many more gray days in our lives than bright sunny ones. I mean when we think about the days that are truly bright and sunny there are just not that many. We only have a child so many times, we don’t get married every day, we can only get promoted some many times. The truly big events don’t happen every day. Don’t get me wrong, I savor the bright sunny days, I love them but most days, we all live in shades of gray.

So what to do, what to do. Start looking at the gray and learn to live on the gray and love it just as much as the bright colors! What the heck does that mean? Well to me this is what that means. It means we need to be understanding, knowing that each point has a counterpoint, each opinion has a dissenting view and each argument is settled with compromise. When we approach an argument from a black and white perspective it makes it difficult to find common ground. Common ground is where all arguments are settled, the various shades of gray. Black and white will never end well in the face of diverse and sometimes tightly held beliefs. The funniest part to me is this, sometimes we hide behind a cloak of ethical and moral righteousness based on our belief system BUT holding onto something so tightly that we are not able to have a civil dialog, is the inverse of what every belief system I have studied teaches. I am just saying, where is the love. Black and white never ends well, and it is because there is not much in life that is not some shade of gray. I have found that it is easier to “agree to disagree” if I am unable to find any common ground. If we are talking about one of the life rules that can not be broken than we have to agree to disagree, continuing the argument past that point is, well pointless. If it does go past that it will continue to escalate and most likely things will be said that can’t be unsaid.

And ya know what makes all that worse? EMAIL. Email is such a one dimensional method of communication and it sucks on a good day. There is no way to understand fully the context. Why, because we can not use the tools we were given to discern context. We can not see the furrowed brow, we can not hear the anger welling up we can not insure our intention was actually understood. And with email sometimes the simplest of messages are misunderstood. So we take the worse possible way of communicating and use that to effectively wage an argument. That is crazy if you ask me. Why do we do it then? We will say things in email that we would not say in a million years to the persons face. Is it that we are cowards or chickens? Is it that in the privacy of our living room it is easier to whip up some righteous indignation? It is so easy to get negative in email and write things that can not be unwritten and really hurt folks feelings. Ya know it just dawned on me, email on the computer is also black and white – what to do? I think I will change the default in my Word and Outlook program to apply a gray color to the font instead of black. Silly little thing, but I will know and I guess you will too.

I guess what I am saying is that no matter the colorof things, love it, live it and for petes sake enjoy it - ALL OF IT!