The Color of Greed is Orange

   Socrates is credited for saying to understand a thing, you must first name it.  In his way of reasoning, how a word is used and what justifies its use are different questions that need to be defined.  I embrace that one of the practices to obtain authenticity is unbiased processing.  Unbiased processing being the absence of reconstructing facts to fit a favored notion. Along with not rationalizing behavior to defend a preferred opinion of one self.  Accepting flaws as well as strengths equally without fear that negative aspects reflect on the value of one’s perceived self image (being worthy, good, adequate).  From that point of view, I’d wish to translate what Socrates meant as that to understand something one must be interested in the truth of its nature.  Without the burden of making it fit a concept of acceptable meaning.  I mention all of that to address a process that I compare to connecting the dots of personal experience.  For instance, when I was just out of High School my peers and I would hang out in the local all night diner and talk about a host of things.  Most I cannot recall, but one game we played was to assign a color to an emotion.  

“What color is love?” Each of us would render our choice and then explain why we’d selected that.  The game would run the gambit of our creative impulses into the late hours of the night.

“What color is greed?” came up, and several were in agreement it’d be a hue of green since greed was close to envy, jealousy and of course Greed and Green sounded so close.  I said, “Orange”

“Why Orange Albert?”

 When I was a kid my mom would cut an orange in half, and then once more, making it into quarters as a treat for us kids during summer. Now I'm a child from what is called a stair step family; meaning there was only a year’s difference between my eldest sister and my middle sister; and then again between her and I.

  So each of us would be given our slice, and we gobble it down as fast as we could because it was a familiar practice between us to quibble and jostle for favor in order to get the very last piece. The unspoken reward in doing this was whoever was the quickest ,would then be first candidate for leftovers.  This was the condition of anything offered to us kids by our parents. Of course, that included whining and whimpering that deserving was akin to quickness.  

But along with this rivalry was something we enjoyed doing with orange rinds in particular.  That was pressing the peels onto our front teeth filling our mouths; then grin, it’d make us laugh so hard the orange would fall out of our open mouths. We had so much fun doing that we’d often forget the contest of  to-the-firstest-goes-the-mostest. I’m thinking now, why did we value the second piece so much when we could only really use one?  But like hungry birds, we just wanted more for the sake of wanting more.

   I take that as a lesson in how we are, in our human experience. If given rise to rely on those childish ways, what I often refer to as playground politics, we'll spend a lot of energy trying to get something we really don't need, but contested for out of principal of being first in order to hoard. Ironically so many of us grow up thinking that’s a necessary tool as an adult too!  More times than not, Mom would take the last piece and play rind smile with us.  Darn, she out foxed our greed!  So for me, Greed would certainly be orange.