I see red. I see blue. But I experience yellow.
Perhaps it was because I had never really thought much about yellow.
Like many people, I have always been drawn to deeper, more commanding colors. Blue has dignity. Red demands attention. Purple carries the ancient associations of royalty, wealth, and power.
Yellow seemed almost ordinary by comparison.
And yet, standing there one day, surrounded by it, I began to wonder whether yellow might be one of the most important colors in our lives.
The sun that rises each morning.
The warm light that enters our homes.
The headlights that guide us through darkness.
The wheat fields that feed nations.
Bananas, lemons, mangoes, and fruits ripening on their branches.
Sunflowers turning instinctively toward the light.
Yellow is everywhere in God’s creation.
Perhaps that is precisely why we hardly notice it.
Red announces itself.
Blue invites admiration.
But yellow simply arrives.
Every morning.
Quietly.
Faithfully.
And somewhere in that realization, I stopped thinking about color.
I began thinking about life.
How many of life’s greatest gifts are experienced rather than noticed?
How many are freely given, so constantly present that we eventually stop recognizing them as gifts at all?
The bright reds and deep blues of life are easy to see. They are the celebrations, achievements, journeys, promotions, milestones, and extraordinary moments. They stand boldly against the canvas of our existence precisely because they are not constant.
But the things that sustain us often resemble yellow.
The spouse who has shared decades of ordinary days beside us.
The friend who always answers the phone.
The faith that quietly steadies us when the road ahead becomes uncertain.
The health we rarely think about until something begins to hurt.
The family members whose presence becomes part of the background of our lives simply because they have always been there.
The home to which we return.
The morning we assume will come.
Another breath.
Another day.
Like sunlight, these gifts illuminate almost everything while asking for very little attention.
Perhaps that is why they are so easily overlooked.
As I have grown older, I have become increasingly aware that gratitude often arrives late.
We spend so much of life searching for the extraordinary that we can fail to appreciate the ordinary blessings that make the extraordinary possible.
We notice health when illness comes.
We understand companionship when someone is gone.
We recognize time when there seems to be less of it ahead.
We appreciate peace after chaos has disturbed it.
And sometimes we understand the magnitude of someone’s presence only when their chair is empty.
The irony is that many of the most valuable things in life are hidden in plain sight.
Not because they are rare.
But because they are constant.
They become so woven into the fabric of our existence that we stop seeing them altogether.
Perhaps gratitude, then, is really an act of seeing.
Not merely giving thanks for the spectacular, but learning to recognize the quiet gifts that have been carrying us all along.
I had spent much of my life admiring the reds and blues.
The achievements.
The milestones.
The places traveled.
The things accomplished.
They were beautiful, and they deserved to be celebrated.
But all along, beneath them and around them, I had been experiencing yellow.
Love.
Family.
Friendship.
Health.
Faith.
Time.
Grace.
The quiet things.
The constant things.
The things without which none of the reds or blues would have mattered very much.
And perhaps this is one of the gifts of growing older: not that the world suddenly reveals something we had never seen before, but that we finally learn how to see what was always there.
The sun was always rising.
The light was always entering the room.
Yellow was always there.
I simply had to learn to see it.
Simply O.
