Grey - Pantone Cool Gray 2C

I really don't care for the color grey as a stand-alone color.

 
The sheer ambiguity of warm grey vs cool grey, or blue-grey vs green-gray. And the spelling, I can't pick which version I like nor does autocorrect tell me one or the other.

 
And yet. Grey skies on a cool fall morning looking over the lake, that's a clear picture. You can definitely tell the difference between that grey ski vs grey storm clouds rolling in as the static crackles on a hot summer day. That grey feels different. How can a color elicit such emotions and feelings when the word has this ambiguity.

Webster says: Grey or Gray, an adjective is 1. of the color, 2. having the hair gray, 3. clothed in grey. All great but what struck me was the last two definitions for grey. You could be lacking in cheer or brightness in mood (Dismal or gloomy) or, and I loved this, "prosaically ordinary" (dull or uninteresting). Lastly, grey can be "having an intermediate and often vaguely defined position, condition, or character".

I would argue, that a grey sky over any body of water after a storm would be anything but dismal or dull. The definition itself is subjective to what we, the individual, find gloomy, uninteresting, or "prosaically ordinary". Storm chasers could probably tell you what every shade of cloud could mean.

 
When I think of the grey area of life; it's the midzone between black and white. Politics and media tend to tell us that we are either one or the other - the first that comes to mind pro-life or pro-choice. Now please don't think this is going to get into that subject but that notion, that you can't be both. You have to be one or the other, and almost aggressively so. Picketing on the street corners and sending angry letters to politicians; the only way to "properly" show your support for your views. It polarizes our reality. Pick any hot-button political issue, google the news headlines; do any of them allow the reader to feel both sides? Hardly.
And yet. We know situations can change perspective. We know you can feel strongly about a subject matter but then have a life-changing experience and then your feelings on the subject change radically. This is normal, this is good. I don't want to be shamed for using a plastic water bottle and a reusable straw at the same time.

 
The midzone between black and white is grey. It's shades of definiteness and conviction. Politics and media want us to be binary, black or white, yes or no, this or that. You can't have both. You can't want to save the planet and have Starbucks. You can't be gluten-free and like bread.

 
But you know what, you can have the grey. You can, and should, be body positive (the weird modern term for larger than a size 8, I think. I'm not actually sure) and be pro healthy choices - trust me, my eastern European jeans have "outlast the hard winter" kneaded into every ounce on me and gets straight-up gleeful over the aroma of bread. I eat my greens daily but to quote Shakira, "these hips don't lie" about the bread I ate 6 months ago.

So have the grey. The grey hair, the grey outlook on society, the grey skies, but just don't drink the greywater. That shit will definitely do harm.

 
Gotta keep it classy
“grey,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grey. Accessed 3/29/2021.