Going Grey

I've been progressively going more grey. Actually, my first grey hair ever I found when I was 24 (which was, umm, some time ago). I pulled it out and carefully preserved it in my journal with scotch tape. However, that one grey hair was the only one for quite a while; the silver didn't start proliferating until a few years ago. My daughter one day, around Christmas time, said "Mom, you've got tinsel on your head! Oh, wait..." (That's a rather festive way of looking at it, isn't it?)

And then yesterday, I was in a conversation with someone, and he said something like this: "As we get older, we see more of the grey areas in life. And I think there is much, much more grey than there is black and white." That, gentle reader, is profound. As the greys on our heads multiply, we also (if we're healthy people) start to see more of the grey around us.

And grey, let me tell you, is an important thing. Remember that chiaroscuro I've been waffling on about some time ago? It's impossible without grey. You need the grey in between the blacks and whites to give shape and depth to your image. In art theory, it's called the halftones. What we call black-and-white is, actually, shades of grey; it's not often you actually get full-on black and full-on white in a picture. You can, of course, and it's very dramatic when you do, but you lose most of the shape and practically all of the depth.

And now I'm wondering: is there, perhaps, a connection between our society's insistence on women, in particular, colouring their hair, not letting the grey show, and a general unwillingness to see the depth and roundedness of life as a whole?

Life, the Universe, and Shades of Grey. It's all in the halftones.