how does looking at life as black or white ruin the magic?

Although black and white can be pretty aesthetic, let’s remember that all black and white pictures work on a grayscale.

They don’t just have black or white, they also have all the shades of grey between them.

Black and white mentality is loved by many because it is clear and concise.

If it’s not good it’s bad.

I believe it comes from a fear of not knowing, or of not having an answer directly for anything.

When we start putting labels on things like black and white, good or bad, pretty or ugly we are limiting life to the extremes. We are not allowing life to be the spectrum that it is and we ourselves get sucked into those two sides.

I’ll give you an example:

Let’s say you are having a wonderful day. It is sunny and you go to a cafe to work on a project you are very excited about. You are being very productive and inspiration is coming to you.

Then someone walks by and accidentally spills coffee on your white shoe.

Well, that means that your day is no longer perfect, you are going to have to “waste your time” cleaning up the shoe back at home because you wanted to use it tomorrow. Now you can’t stop thinking about the shoe and how it’s not perfectly clean. It messes with your vibe, the aesthetic of it all.

So now you are not inspired and you let that 1-second ruin the rest of your day because you now carry a horrible attitude.

The day has become “bad” and that is because there was a “perfect” before it.

When we assign those types of extremes to situations in our lives we are letting the things that don’t fit in those boxes control our days.

The goal is to stop assigning these strong labels to our lives.

Which is not easy, especially If you have lived your whole life like this. It becomes daunting to initially accept a day as not perfect since the beginning.

Maybe through your head you are thinking, well that’s not true there are certainly some people that have a perfect day, I see all influencers have wonderful days, living a lavish life with no problems.

And to that I say, it’s not true. My goal here is to demystify the “manifest your perfect life” idea that you have in your mind.

The truth is most of their life does look like that, but it is not ONLY that, it is not just black, and then white when they used to have hardships in the before pictures.

It is a constant up and down, what they achieve is being able to handle those downs differently. They shift the way they look at the “bad” things that happen to them in life. They don’t assign a strong label to those parts of their life.

They look at them as opportunities, as something to learn from, and as life shows them something they can change.

And that is what we are seeking to do. Instead of our day being ruined because we no longer have a white shoe, we take the opportunity and say, well I have been meaning to give them a deep clean for weeks, this will make them last longer.

Of course, it was not completely fun to have coffee in your shoe, but was not bad, it just was what it was.

So how do we change this black-and-white mindset?

My idea is to start looking at your life as if it were constantly filmed for you to watch later. Play the influencer role.

Something “bad” (inconvenient) happened?

“Oh don’t worry guys, I mean it’s a shame but that opens the opportunity to look for a different way to do it, come with me as we find out.”

Something actually tragic happened?

“I’m going to take some time away from the spotlight to process my emotions, and when I feel better I will be back to be a shining inspiration for you”

Maybe in your head, it sounds ridiculous, but picture the way you look at life-changing. You would have far fewer days “ruined” ( I might be exhausting my use of “”).

What if I still want my perfect days?

It is not like they are going to go away, but we won’t put those high expectations by labelling them as perfect.

What if that is the way the most normal of your days went? If you looked at them as normal they would no longer be outliers and you would be welcoming them to the spectrum of your life.

Sure there will be some days that are 10% more perfect than the rest. And the point is not to stop enjoying them but to honour them as a part of the fullness of life.

Comically as I am writing this is a coffee shop, there is a 5-year-old girl screaming “very exciting! Very exciting, very exciting” in a cute baby English accent.

So take that as a sign, and appreciate that both the black and whites and even all of the greys even if they are not as emotionally erratic are “very exciting.”

Now, in order to actually put this into practice instead of just knowing it.

Let’s go through our weekly prompts, shall we?

1. What do you believe are the benefits that your mind and body get from black-and-white thinking?
2. How troubling are your “bad” and how great are your “goods”?
3. Why do you think you avoid the grey, the meh of life? Do you think it’s boring?
4. Is boring actually that bad? What would balance feel like for you?
5. How would fewer emotional highs or lows change your impulsivity?
6. What would happen if you started to look at life like an actual black-and-white picture (with lots of greys)?

To be honest, I don’t love the black-and-white analogy. I like colour so the idea of this grey mindset bothers me a bit. I would rather call it a rainbow mindset or something like that. Maybe in the next post, you will find a cooler name.

Allowing ourselves to sit in this mindset is definitely uncomfortable. Especially if we have been riding those highs and lows like an inexperienced surfer (barely not drowning most of the time, but exalted when they get a wave).

So apart from changing the way you look at life to influencer mode you might also consider feeling the icky sticky discomfort of boringness once in a while. Maybe find the peace and calm behind it.

But oh please don’t turn it into one of the sides of a new black-and-white view of life.

Calm and chaos are still opposites and therefore very black and white.

Live lable-less for a bit.