The Palettes of Life

• A Diary Essay on Inner Seasons, the Memory of the Soul, and the Quiet Art of Becoming 

There are mornings when the world seems unfinished, as though the night has left its final shadows resting on the windowsills and the light has not yet decided how far to reach. I wake at such an hour, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, when thoughts are still indistinct and silence possesses a particular density, one in which even the most ordinary things begin to speak. The glass of water on the bedside table, the cold touch of the floor, the faint noise of the city gradually returning to itself. And I find myself thinking that life is not a single painting we must bring to completion, but a palette that continually changes along with the person holding it.

I once believed there was a particular way of being oneself, some inner model one had to discover, perfect, and then preserve intact through the years. I imagined the self as a pure color, something original and untouched by time, waiting only to be recognized beneath the layers of other people's expectations, fears, and compromises. Today, I am no longer so certain. Perhaps there is no single color that defines us. Perhaps we are a combination of shades, some clear and luminous, others murky, almost imperceptible, and still others hidden so deeply within us that we discover them only when life places us in circumstances for which we were never prepared.

We are simultaneously the artist, the canvas, and the trace left behind by every movement of the brush that came before. Within us live different versions of ourselves, different ages, different ways of loving, fearing, believing, and protecting ourselves. There is a version of me who once waited for recognition with an almost childlike hope, another who learned not to ask for too much in order to avoid disappointment, and a third who now stands on the threshold of some new understanding, unsure whether she is ready to cross it. Sometimes these inner selves understand one another. At other times, they seem to speak different languages, each insisting that its own way of surviving is the only right one.

Perhaps this is what we call inner complexity: not the absence of wholeness, but the difficulty of bringing all our parts together into a single, present self.

The Seasons in Which We Become Different People

When I look back on certain years of my life, I feel as though I am looking at color photographs taken under different lighting. In some, everything is golden, filled with anticipation and that innocent conviction that a desire, if held strongly enough, can change any reality. In others, the light is cold, faces seem more distant, and the places where I once felt at home no longer recognize me. There are also photographs I would never throw away, yet cannot look at for very long, because in them I see not only what I have lived through, but also what I failed to understand in time.

It is strange how different our ways of living can be. In one season, we seek closeness, almost dissolving into another person and believing that love means making room for someone in every chamber of our inner home. In another, we begin guarding our boundaries so insistently that even goodness struggles to find its way in. Once, we needed to be seen; later, we long to go unnoticed. Sometimes we dream of change, yet when it arrives, we feel nostalgic for what we knew, because even suffering, when repeated often enough, can begin to resemble home.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, there is something deeply human in this. The psyche does not easily abandon its familiar paths, even when they lead us back to places where we are wounded. We often repeat not because we wish to suffer, but because, unconsciously, we hope that this time the old story will have a different ending. Perhaps we fall in love again with someone who cannot fully choose us because some unfinished part of us is still waiting to be chosen by someone whose approval we once experienced as essential to our survival. Perhaps we postpone our own beginnings because, somewhere inside, we associate success with the danger of disappointing those who have grown accustomed to our helplessness. Perhaps we return to familiar fears because the unknown demands trust, and trust can sometimes be more difficult than suffering.

This does not mean every decision we make can be traced back to childhood, or that the past is a sentence written somewhere beyond our reach. Rather, the past leaves certain pathways within us, and we continue to follow them until we begin to notice where they lead. Perhaps the first genuine movement toward change occurs not when we condemn our old patterns, but when we manage to look at them without hatred. To see how they once served us, what they protected us from, and why, now that our circumstances have changed, they no longer help us in the same way.

I wish I could embrace every former version of myself, even those who made decisions I would no longer make today. Not necessarily to justify them, but to understand the limitations within which they lived. Compassion for our past does not cancel our responsibility for the present; it gives us the strength to carry that responsibility without becoming our own judges.

Changing Tracks and the Quiet Resistance of the Old

Sometimes life changes direction so imperceptibly that we continue moving by inertia for a long time, convinced we are still on the same path. A relationship has changed, an attachment has lost some of its former power, an old desire no longer wakes us in the morning, yet we continue arranging our days according to its rhythm. From the outside, everything looks familiar. The same people, the same streets, the same conversations. And yet, within us, something has quietly shifted.

Then comes the moment when we must acknowledge that we have outgrown a particular way of existing. Not because it was necessarily bad, but because it has fulfilled its purpose. A job may once have offered security, only to become a place where we gradually lose our voice. A relationship may have taught us intimacy, yet eventually begin to demand that we abandon too much of ourselves. A dream may have been genuine when we first imagined it, and still cease to reflect the person we have become.

There is a particular sorrow in leaving something that once mattered. Even when the decision is right, an empty space remains within us, one that cannot immediately be filled with new meaning. Sometimes I wonder whether we mistake emptiness for loss because we are accustomed to filling every available space with plans, relationships, tasks, and expectations. Perhaps there are transitions that should not be filled. Perhaps sometimes we must remain without a direction for a while, allowing our inner world to catch up with the changes that have already taken place in the outer one.

Changing tracks does not always look like a brave decision. Sometimes it is the quiet admission that we can no longer live in a way that requires us to be absent from ourselves every day.

The Fashion of Life and the Personal Style of the Soul

There is something else I think about when I observe the ways people construct their lives. We do not dress ourselves in clothes alone. We dress ourselves in ideas of success, ready-made images of happiness, and other people's definitions of maturity, femininity, strength, and spirituality. Sometimes we adopt a particular model because we genuinely like it, but sometimes we do so because we are afraid of being left outside a world in which everyone else seems so certain of themselves.

Gradually, we learn the fashion of life. We learn what we are supposed to desire at a certain age, what love is supposed to look like, when we should have achieved something, how we should speak about our success, and even how we should present our pain. In an age when so much of human existence becomes an image, we begin to look at ourselves from the outside, as though we were simultaneously the person living and the audience evaluating the performance.

We can be impeccably composed and inwardly lost. We can speak about peace while our bodies remain in a constant state of readiness for danger. We can publish words about freedom while continuing to make choices governed by the fear of disapproval. And how exhausting it is to maintain an image we once created in order to be accepted, only to turn it into proof that we deserve to remain accepted.

Gradually, I have begun to believe that the true style of living is not what we show the world, but how we inhabit our own lives when no one is watching. How we respond to our own exhaustion. Whether we allow ourselves not to know. Whether we hear our own no before the body is forced to express it through depletion. Whether we can enjoy something small without feeling guilty for not having accomplished more. Whether we can love someone without turning that love into proof of our own worth.

Perhaps the personal style of the soul resembles a garment no one can see, but in which we can breathe. It need not be striking. Sometimes it is ordinary, made of small habits, honest words, quiet refusals, timely rest, and the ability not to betray ourselves for the sake of someone else's comfort. And if, one day, I learn to wear such an inner garment without feeling ashamed of its simplicity, perhaps I will feel that I have finally come home.

The Layers of Color and the Invisible Depths

When I think about the inner layers of a person, I imagine an old wall painted many times over the years. Beneath the latest coat of paint, another begins to show; beneath that, a third. And if you look carefully at a peeling patch, you discover traces of colors no one uses anymore, colors no one would choose today. And yet they remain, embedded in the surface, bearing witness to former tastes, fears, hopes, and decisions.

Our inner layers accumulate in much the same way. One layer is shaped by our family environment, another by the loves that have changed us, and a third by losses we have never quite managed to grieve. There is a layer of social roles, a layer of unspoken desires, a layer of anger we have deemed unacceptable, and a layer of sorrow we have concealed beneath productivity, smiles, and constant movement. Some parts of us are visible even to strangers; others reveal themselves only in rare moments, when our defenses weaken and we find ourselves alone with something that has been waiting a long time to be heard.

Psychoanalysis offers us a language with which to think about these layers: unconscious desires, defense mechanisms, transference, repressed feelings, repetition. Yet sometimes the concepts remain mere words until we feel their presence in our own lives. For example, when we discover that our irritation with someone is far stronger than the situation itself would warrant, or that another person's confidence awakens an inexplicable sadness within us. In such moments, we can ask ourselves whether we are reacting to something else as well, something older that the present has touched without creating.

Not every powerful emotion is a trace of trauma, not every fear conceals a secret, and not every coincidence is a sign from destiny. Still, it is useful to listen to ourselves before accepting our first explanation as final. Sometimes helplessness lies beneath anger, fear of rejection beneath distance, and beneath the constant need to be useful lies an old belief that love must be earned. Sometimes, beneath the desire to control everything, there is a very small inner being who still remembers what it felt like to be left without an answer.

And this is where a deeper kind of cleansing begins. Not the harsh removal of everything painful, not a forceful attempt to become light-filled, peaceful, and perpetually positive, but the gradual recognition of what we no longer wish to carry unconsciously. To distinguish our own feelings from those we have taken on from others. To separate genuine guilt from inherited shame. To see where we are responsible, and where we continue punishing ourselves for things that were never entirely within our control.

Not everything dark within us is evil, and not everything light within us is healed. Sometimes darkness is simply an unexplored room, while light is merely a carefully maintained mask. We need to be able to enter both without identifying ourselves completely with either.

Old and New Karma

Sometimes I use the word karma to name those invisible threads connecting our choices with their consequences, our encounters with our inner readiness, and our old reactions with new circumstances. I do not know whether every encounter is predestined, or whether every event carries a hidden message sent specifically for us. Rather, I sense that certain repetitions give our lives the feeling of a cycle, until we understand what within ourselves continues to sustain them.

Old karma, in this personal and metaphorical sense, may be what we continue to reproduce because we have not yet found another way of existing. The same guilt carried from one relationship into another. The same silence that appears during every conflict. The same need to rescue others so that we do not have to face our own vulnerability. The same readiness to forgive others everything while forgiving ourselves almost nothing.

But I would not want to believe that pain is an obligatory lesson sent by some invisible judge, or that suffering proves spiritual guilt. A person does not deserve abuse, neglect, or loss simply because there is still something left for them to learn. Sometimes things happen for which there is no just explanation. Sometimes innocent people suffer, good intentions cannot prevent loss, and prayer remains unanswered. Acknowledging this does not destroy spirituality. Perhaps it frees spirituality from the need to explain everything.

New karma begins where we stop passing on what has wounded us. When we can feel anger without turning it into cruelty. When we relinquish the desire to make someone else experience what we have experienced. When we choose not to repeat a familiar scenario, even if doing so leaves us briefly without a sense of security. Perhaps destiny does not always change through great decisions; sometimes it changes in the seconds when we consciously refuse to perform the old gesture.

This feels to me like a small prayer, addressed not to the heavens but to life itself: may what has passed through me not continue through me in the same way.

The Positive, the Negative, and the Right to Be Whole

For a long time, I believed that spiritual development meant rising above negativity, keeping one's thoughts pure, avoiding low vibrations, and choosing light over every form of darkness. There is an understandable desire in this to keep ourselves from becoming lost in destructive states, but there is also a danger: spirituality can become yet another way of abandoning ourselves.

What happens to sadness when we refuse to let it exist? Where does anger go when we are convinced that a mature person should never feel angry? What happens to jealousy, envy, fear, and disappointment when we condemn them before understanding what they are trying to tell us? They do not disappear simply because they are incompatible with our image of a good or spiritual person. Sometimes they hide, adopt more acceptable forms, and begin directing our decisions from a place the conscious mind cannot easily reach.

I do not want to romanticize suffering. I do not believe we must remain in pain to prove our depth, nor that every hardship makes us wiser. Pain can close a person off, harden them, and deprive them of trust. But once pain has become part of our story, we can try to meet it with attention instead of adding to it the humiliation of having felt it in the first place.

Gradually, the positive has ceased to mean perpetual cheerfulness for me. It has come to mean the ability to remain connected to life even on days when nothing seems beautiful. To avoid confusing a bad day with a bad life. Not to mistake temporary hopelessness for an ultimate truth. To be able to say, I am hurting, without surrendering hope, and I am afraid, without handing the future over entirely to fear.

Inner light is not the absence of shadow, but the ability to remain in relationship with ourselves when the shadow appears. Sometimes that light is very small, like the flame of a candle in a room with a slightly open window, but it is enough to help us distinguish the outlines of things and keep us from becoming completely lost.

Metamorphosis: Changing Without Abandoning Yourself

I imagine change as the act of getting dressed in a quiet room while rain falls outside and the world makes no demand that we explain where we are going. We take off a garment we have worn for a long time, and only then notice how tightly it has fitted us. Marks remain on our skin from its seams; for a moment, we feel the cold, perhaps a little discomfort at our own nakedness. The new garment has not yet adapted to our movements, and we ourselves do not know how we will feel wearing it.

Such is the soul's metaphorical act of changing clothes. Sometimes we must part with the role of the strong person who never needs help. At other times, with the image of the good woman who always understands, always forgives, and always finds an excuse for someone else's behavior. Perhaps we must also let go of the identity of the person who constantly searches for answers because the unknown feels unbearable. And sometimes the hardest garment to remove is the one made of suffering, especially when we have grown accustomed to recognizing ourselves through it and do not know who we will be if we stop living in anticipation of the next wound.

Change, however, does not have to be a spectacle. We do not need to sever every connection, transform our entire lives, or announce a new beginning to the world. Sometimes transformation takes place in the way we respond to a message, in the decision not to explain ourselves to someone who has no desire to understand us, in going to bed on time instead of proving our own endurance. Sometimes it is the quiet permission to become different from the person our loved ones remember.

I want to learn how to change without feeling the need to despise my former self. Not to burn bridges simply because they no longer serve me in the same way. To be able to say: This was my choice then; this is my understanding now. To acknowledge that I once loved what I would not choose today, and that I believed in things I can no longer accept. This does not make my past false. It simply means that time has continued to work within me.

To transform does not mean becoming a stranger to yourself. It means making room for the part of you that has been waiting a long time to grow.

The Aura and the Colors of the Invisible

When I imagine a person's aura, I do not necessarily think of something that can be measured or proven. For me, it is more like a poetic name for what we sense in someone's presence: the way a person enters a room without taking it over; the attention with which they listen; the silence they leave behind after a conversation; the lightness or tension that arises within us while we are beside them.

Some people carry the feeling of morning blue, of cool water and an open window. Others resemble deep crimson velvet, saturated with life, desire, and concealed anxiety. There are people whose presence feels like soft yellow light, never dazzling, yet making things clearer. And there are those around whom we gather cautiously, unsure whether closeness will warm us or leave us struggling for air.

Perhaps these colors tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the person standing before us. Our experiences color our perceptions. When we have been wounded by coldness, another person's distance may seem threatening, even when they simply need space. When we are accustomed to rescuing others, someone else's sadness may attract us with an almost irresistible force, as though we have finally been given the task through which we will earn our place. When we have begun to trust our own perceptions, we can distinguish when someone is genuinely violating our boundaries and when old fear is merely recognizing a familiar silhouette in the dark.

In spiritual language, colors can serve as symbols of states of consciousness. Green reminds us of restoration, blue of truth and silence, white of space and new beginnings, gold of gratitude and inner dignity. Yet I do not wish to turn these symbols into rules. I do not believe a person must always be radiant to be good, or perpetually calm to be spiritually connected. Some truths are spoken in a trembling voice. Some prayers begin in despair. Some acts of kindness appear harsh because, at last, they establish a boundary.

If I have my own idea of a clear aura, it is not one of flawless whiteness. It is more the sense that a person does not habitually hide from themselves what they carry; that they can acknowledge their envy without turning it into malice, feel their anger without using it as a weapon, and be happy for another person without denying their own desires. The purity of our inner world is not sterility, but an honesty that is unafraid to see the full human palette.

Divine Silence and Ordinary Miracles

There are days when I pray without knowing exactly what I want to say. I do not necessarily seek a solution, nor a sign confirming that I am on the right path. Sometimes I simply remain still, my hands wrapped around a warm cup, feeling that words are too small for what is happening within me. In such moments, prayer is not a request but a presence. It is not an attempt to change the will of God, but a desire to remain open to life even when I do not understand the way it unfolds.

Divine silence is difficult to accept. We want an answer because an answer creates a sense of direction, and direction protects us from the fear that we are alone before the unknown. Sometimes we wait for a sign for so long that we cease to see everything else that continues to happen. We wait for a door to open without noticing that the window is ajar. We wait for someone to choose us while forgetting that we can choose ourselves. We wait to be rescued from pain instead of gradually creating a life in which pain is no longer our only home.

I do not know why some prayers receive no visible answer. I would not want to explain every loss as a necessary step toward spiritual growth, or claim that everything happens according to a predetermined plan. Sometimes the only honest thing to do is admit that we do not know. And yet we can continue to believe, even if our faith has become different from what it once was, less certain of its explanations and more willing to remain beside the questions.

For me, spirituality is gradually moving away from the idea that I must rise above the human condition and drawing closer to the possibility of being more fully present within it. Washing the dishes without rushing. Watching the steam rise from a bowl of soup on a winter evening. Noticing the weariness in a loved one's voice and asking how they are without immediately offering a solution. Opening the window and breathing in the scent of wet earth after the rain. Accepting that not every minute has to be useful in order to have the right to exist.

Perhaps the sacred does not always arrive as a revelation. Sometimes it is the most ordinary moment in which we stop being absent from our own lives.

The Morning Palette

Now the light has reached the wall opposite me. Its color is almost white, yet there is a little gold in it, a trace of dusty rose, and that barely perceptible grey the morning leaves behind after the night. I look at it and think that perhaps I, too, am like this in the present season of my life: not entirely clear, not entirely finished, composed of colors that do not yet know what they will look like beside one another.

I do not want to cleanse myself of everything that has been. I do not want to deny the darker periods, pretend that my old fears have disappeared, or declare every hesitation a step backward. I want to learn to distinguish what belongs to me from what I have carried out of love, fear, loyalty, or the desire to be accepted. I want to preserve what was good without being obliged to preserve the pain that once accompanied it. I want to be able to return to my memories without having to live inside them all over again.

Perhaps this is maturity, something we reach not all at once but through countless small partings. We part with the need to be understood by everyone. With the belief that love must be painful to be real. With the desire to foresee everything so that we will never be surprised. With the hope that if we are good enough, we will never be abandoned. We also part with the idea that we must become someone else to deserve a new life.

There are things we still do not know. There are imperfections, questions, unfinished conversations, and desires that may never take precisely the form we imagined for them. Yet it no longer seems necessary to resolve everything before I am allowed to feel peace. Sometimes peace arrives not after the final answer, but when we stop demanding that we find it immediately.

I do not want a life without shadows. I want eyes that can see through them. I do not want a soul without scars. I want to stop mistaking my scars for my entire self. And I do not want to remain forever the same, because I now understand how unfair it would be to demand permanence from a being that is continually learning how to live.

Perhaps the palettes of life are precisely this: the way experience meets possibility, the way old colors remain beneath the new ones without necessarily contaminating them, and the way a soul gradually learns to work even with what it once considered a mistake. Not everything can be repaired. Not every loss becomes wisdom, not every encounter carries a clear message, and not every change begins with hope. Sometimes it begins with exhaustion, with a quiet enough, with the impossibility of continuing in the old way.

And that, too, is a beginning.

I leave the cup on the table and walk toward the window. The air is cool, the street is filling with movement, somewhere a door closes, someone hurries to work, a person crosses the pavement carrying a paper bag that smells of warm bread. The world has not become any less complicated simply because I have spent time thinking about it. But for a moment, it seems more bearable, perhaps because I am no longer trying to comprehend all of it at once.

Within me there is still the old blue, dark and deep as water in winter. There is grey from the words left unspoken, green from what is slowly recovering, and a little gold from the gratitude that appears unexpectedly, without asking whether everything is all right. There are colors I still cannot name, and others I will probably discover only in the next season.

I allow them to be there.

I do not need to finish the painting today. It is enough to remain beside it, to breathe, and to accept that I am still learning. That change has no final form, that the spiritual path is not always an ascent, that the psyche needs time to release its old defenses, and that self-love sometimes begins not with admiration, but with patience.

Perhaps the deepest transformation is to stop treating our lives as a badly painted picture and begin experiencing them as a living, changing work of art, in which even what remains unfinished has its place.

The morning is here now. It promises me nothing. And there is a quiet grace in that very absence of promises. I can begin again without erasing yesterday. I can change direction without despising the road that brought me here. I can carry my story without allowing it to dictate every sentence that comes next.

And perhaps that is enough for today: to let the light enter, not hurry to call it a sign, not demand an explanation from it. Simply to feel it on my skin and remember that every new day is another space in which the soul can choose a different color.