Whenever I’m online, I always grow impatient for those “skip this ad in 4 seconds” prompt to activate. I know those commercials are the reason I’m seeing videos for free, but I still tap my finger on the mouse until they disappear.
Last week, I was looking for a dropped paper clip and didn’t get a chance to escape the mandatory ad, and I’m glad I watched. The four-minute video was from Valspar and is entitled “Color for the Colorblind.”
Together with EnChroma, Valspar developed glasses for color-blind people. They’ve never seen the subtle hues of a rainbow, the differences in Crayola colors nor have they seen the vibrant yellows and oranges of a sunset.
The video is amazing. People describe how the world looks gray without the glasses and then how they’re almost speechless when seeing colors for the first time.
They knew they weren’t seeing all the colors, but they grew accustomed to the world as they were seeing it.
All of us compensate in some way – we squint to bring the newspaper into focus, order glasses to correct the issue or give up trying to read the small print. If we can’t see it, then the problem must not be there.
Whether or not these glasses, or others like them, worked wasn’t what I was thinking about after the video. What stayed with me, besides watching people see color for the first time, was one line from a physicist – “We don’t all see the world the same way.”
He’s absolutely right. We can look at a crowded room and either see a place where we’d love to hang out or a room they’d have to drag us in kicking and screaming.
We can see the world as a vicious, terrifying place, filled with shadows and violence, or see a world of possibilities and beauty, even when that beauty isn’t textbook castles and fluffy clouds. Our point of view depends on the lens with which we choose to see the world.
After watching the video, I read quite a few articles about glasses for the color blind. For some, the glasses didn’t work, including one disappointed reporter who was bitter and angry.
There’s a scientific reason Valspar posted as to why the glasses don’t work for all colorblind people, but for that writer, new glasses didn’t change his outlook. In fact, not seeing what the glasses delivered to others made him bitterly angry.
I can’t say I blame him, but I don’t think he stopped to think that whenever we decide to look at the world in a different light, we’ve already changed our perspective no matter what our eyes tell us.
Someone with worn clothes usually gets judged as untrustworthy. But most of us have seen someone we pre-judged as beneath us carry the groceries for an elderly person or pick up litter from the street.
We’ve all thought well of the person in the expensive suit and thought that person had it made. And we’ve all experienced seeing that same guy walk right past a needy person, cut us off in traffic and snag our place in the grocery line because he thinks he’s entitled.
But when we decide to put on different lenses, we see people and the world in a different light, not through a pre-conceived filter of how we think life is supposed to be.
I wish a manufacturer could make glasses to allow us to see different points of view without judgment. Maybe then we’d really see the colors in the world.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.