To Be Is to Beam

Imagine a spectrum of light—a rich band of blended hues. Imagine this spectrum of light represents your full range of expression, with your most exuberant mode topping out at the highest frequencies one can perceive and your most subdued registering at the lowest. Now, consider the people in your life who take you to these extremes.

When you dwell in those dreary basement registers, who’s there with you? Picture her sitting across from you, gabbing at three hundred words per minute. Her staccato chatter pierces the airwaves yet barely registers at all: empty but deafening, like a penny in a glass jug, rattling next to your ear. In surrender, you dial yourself down. She takes your silence as permission to persist—though it’s less permission and more submission.

Your light dims to a faint glow. Tell me, what color is it now? The mucky beige of quicksand, or even a purplish-black—so pitch dark it absorbs into its murky depths any light you’d otherwise give off. Dulled to the occasional one-word response, your frequency is now one of infrequency. Cornered and listless, you plot your escape.

Who else tarnishes your shine to a dull grey? To run into someone who you once loved is to see a ghost. This encounter leaves you pale, drained of saturation. The paths of your lives once traveled together in a harmonic wave, but now they’ve refracted away from each other. Still, you replay memories through the rosy lens of nostalgia. The pressure of things left unsaid well in your chest. You go blank. How many times have you rehearsed for this moment? Every emotion, thought, and word simultaneously clamors for expression. Every color of light cast simultaneously onto a single point becomes white.

Maybe you’ve reconciled with someone after seeing them in a new light. Like a parent whose brilliance you see only now. A mother or father who wanted the best for you, who still wants the best for you. The only difference is you’ve realized they were trying to do their best with what they had. When did your memory of childhood and your hindsight of adulthood collide in full kaleidoscopic definition? It’s clear now, isn’t it? To be a parent is to give. To be a daughter or son is to forgive.

Now imagine just yourself. Consider a moment when you are aglow, the embers of your soul set alight. Is it due to a long gaze from your lover, laser-like, beaming white-hot from across the room? Or maybe the great lightness in your being comes from a state of flow. A happy hum washes over you, the color of these waves a cool blue. A current propels you. Electricity through water: a surge so strong everything it touches stands on end.

When do you feel this way amongst others? Perhaps you felt this way at the last social gathering. You’re shoulder to shoulder in conversation, and you’re coursing ahead to make a prompt delivery of a joke. You’re on the precipice of the punchline. Tension hangs humid. You land the line like a pilot lands a plane. Release erupts from all around you. Deep belly laughs top the Richter scale. Tears pour from wet eyes. And all the while you’re beaming.

What color are you beaming? Not when you tell jokes, but right now? What ranges of light and expression have you been occupying lately? Is that where you want to be? Have you explored the outer edges of your range? Are you sure you’ve felt the tremors of unrestrained expression up high and the mutters of self-effacing retreat down low? That you pushed your bounds so wholly—like a rubber band stretched beyond its original form—that your new minimum and maximum points must be replotted? And how delectable that none of us can claim that still? That there are expressions of you that remain to be unfurled. That they are an unseen mystery—a vibrance still imperceptible. The ultraviolet. The infrared.

It’s both tantalizing and terrifying, the thought that this infinite potential lives within us all. I guess you could consider that we are the people in life who will take you there. Some of us will coerce and stuff you into claustrophobic ranges until you crumple like a raincoat. Others of us will coax you to stratospheric heights so grand that your prior limits burn away, like meteors in the sky.

So the question then becomes: who are you willing to go there with? ▩