55. Maybe It Isn't What It Seems

It's 5 pm already. I'm supposed to be finished with this but I'm not. Drip, drip, drip… I missed it again! What am I doing wrong? I'm going to fail this chemistry practical. This is what I thought as I was performing a titration experiment in my first-year university chemistry class many years ago. Titration is an experiment where a volume of a solution of known concentration is added to a volume of another solution to determine its concentration. I was looking for a pinkish color change to the solution as an alkali, a type of chemical substance with high pH, was dripping slowly into an acid, a substance but with high pH. But it never happened - or so I thought.

I could tell the lab assistants were getting annoyed and wanted to go home too. I was the last one there. I didn't know what to do until an assistant approached me. He took out a book, went to the first page, and then asked me to tell him what number was on this page of a circle filled with colored dots. We continued until, on a certain page, I couldn't see any number. He seemed to understand something now. I was confused but that changed quickly when he revealed what the circle with colored dots was about. It turns out that I had a form of color blindness. This is why I never could see the color change. I was relieved. I went through several irrational explanations for not being able to complete this experiment, causing myself suffering when the truth was I was blind. I was color-blind and blind to rationality. 

“There is a joke that we always told each other in my school when we had to analyze texts or poetry that goes something like this:

Teacher: What did the author mean when he said that the curtains are blue?

Pupil 1: The curtains are a replacement for the endless skies that can't be seen from the inside. They are the narrators way to connect to the outside world by mimicking the world.

Pupil 2: Blue was obviously a color that symbolized being calm in the time the author lived. By making the curtains blue he allowed the reader to get a glimpse of the narrators state of mind, which is calm in the face of the upcoming storm.

Pupil 3: No, obviously it was just a barricade to shut himself out of the world and by making it blue he wanted to show to other people that he was normal and yearning for the outside, while deep inside his chest he knew that he would never want to leave his house again.

Teacher: You are all completely wrong. Blue is obviously part of the greater color scheme. If you had a look at the first pages of the book you would notice the turquoise boots, later these blue curtains and in the end the green grass. The curtains are merely a symbol for the change that is happening throughout the book. Remember this kids: metamorphosis is an important topic in basically all books of this time! It is a concept that you need to understand in order to pass the test.

...

Author: Blue is my favourite color.”

(Source: writing.stackexchange)

It is hard to know what we cannot see, but there are usually more ways to see something than how we see it.