“She knew she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.” ~ Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

I love that. First, did you know that white is simply the sum of ALL colors?

Yep. The sun, for example, sends white light down to our little planet--light composed of all the colors of the spectrum that we can’t see unless there are some funky atmospheric conditions that bend the light rays and create... a rainbow. Cool, eh? (Of course, you can also use a prism to demonstrate this fact. :)

So, as Rand so *beautifully* captures, if we want WHITE light, we’ve gotta mix ALL the colors. The pain, the suffering and alllllll the not-so-pretty colors are what give us the strength, the wisdom, the compassion and the overall mojo to let our light shine. Powerful stuff.

I say we smile at all the challenges that’ve given us the spectrum of experience we need to let our lights fully shine!

[For the record, black is the ABSENCE of color. It’s the inability (or unwillingness, technically), to allow the full spectrum of life’s experiences to penetrate us so deeply that we emerge as pure light. When we fail to see the good and the bad, the pain and the joy, within ourselves, we tend to, as Jung says, “project our shadow” (that would be black :) onto the world in the form of criticism, irritation, frustration, etc. So, let’s go full spectrum. Turn on your light.]