Things Are Not Always What They Seem
The Sky Is Not Blue, the Grass Is Not Green, and I Didn't (Deliberately) Trip My Son
“Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see.”
An ex-coworker used to say that; he had heard it from his dad. I thought it was disturbingly cynical at best and ludicrous at worst. After all, if you lived by that credo, you would never give credence to anything anyone ever told you, even your parents, your teachers, your spouse, or your best friend. And as for only believing half of what you saw, if you were to do that, how would you know which half to believe and which half to doubt?
I acknowledge now, though, that my former workmate and his pop had a point: you must be wary of what people tell you because they can either be 1) confused/misinformed (unknowingly misleading you) or 2) attempting to hoodwink you (deliberately misleading you). And as for not believing everything you see, here’s a case in point:
I once tripped my son when he was a toddler, and he fell sprawling face-first on the linoleum. A lady at the other end of the store we were in saw it happen; she walked over to us, gave me the Dikembe Mutombo fingerwag, and said, “I saw what you did!” I said nothing in reply. After all, I had tripped my son, and I knew that telling her it was an accident would doubtless be met with disbelief. It was an accident, though, and I had immediately picked Kelvin up, apologized to him, and made sure he was okay (he was fine; he didn’t even cry). But the lady who “caught me in the act” wasn’t going to believe that, so I said nothing. I simply looked at her to let her know that I had heard her, but did not deny or excuse my action (Kelvin and I had been “goofing around” while waiting for my wife/his mom to finish shopping, with him trying to run past me as we faced each other, and I would move left or right to block his path, but I moved too slowly to the right once, and he tripped over my leg).
What the lady saw was among the 50% of her ocular sensations that she should have discounted or disbelieved. She thought she saw me deliberately trip my son, but in reality she didn’t. In hindsight, I do appreciate that she “stood up for him” by calling me out on it, though — her heart was in the right place, anyway.
That was not, of course, a unique event. Many things that we see are “optical illusions,” as it were. For example, the sun appears to rise in the sky, but it doesn’t, really. It only seems that way from our perspective; the same goes for the “setting” or falling/dropping of the sun at the close of day. We are simply seeing the sun from a different vantage point on these occasions; it is not literally rising or sinking.
Another example, and one which will probably cause some irritation, eye-rolling, or even dissent from some corners, is that the sky is not blue and grass is not green. These statements are true because objects are (in their very essence, that is) the colors they absorb; the color they are not is what we see when we look at them—that hue is being repelled, or reflected back toward our eyes. Thus, an object which we would normally call green (such as an Irish meadow or a Green Bay Packers jersey) is actually every color except green. It has absorbed (and thus, is) all the other colors, and has bounced back to our eyes the color it is not (green, in these examples). Black is really nothing, color-wise (objects we see as black have absorbed no color at all). Objects that we perceive as being white are really complex: they are comprised of every color, having greedily and insatiably absorbed the entire spectrum of color, hogged them all for itself, and are reflecting nothing back to us.
I grant you, though, that it would be too tedious to always say things like, “the sky is every color except sky blue” and “oranges are every color except orange.” Experts in the field say there are 18 decillion distinct colors. I had never heard of a decillion before googling that, but that number is represented by an 18 followed by 33 zeros: 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So you definitely could not be expected to say that a white object — such as a brand-spanking new baseball or volleyball — is (and then enumerate each of the 18 decillion colors); even saying, “That baseball is every color” or “that strawberry is every color except red” is pretty much an unsustainable proposition. My recommendation is that you still say the sky is blue, the grass is green, etc., even though you know you are telling a fib, of sorts, in uttering those things.
As my ex-coworker advised, when you hear yourself saying the sky is blue, don’t believe it; and when you look at an orange (the citrus fruit) and it appears to be orange (in color) to you, don’t you believe that, either.