Gray is the way life is
Li Li
There are many people who, all their lives, seek security and are willing to do anything in order to gain certainty about the future. Others are very tolerant of uncertainty. They have a deep understanding of the complexity of the world, so they are good at accepting uncertainty and are accustomed to making decisions in highly uncertain environments. The latter kind of person is the one who accepts the grayscale of the world.
The so-called grayscale refers to a series of transition colors from black to white between pure white and pure black. The development of everything in the world, the characteristics of each person, and the situation of each team are not black and white, and there is a vast gray space in it. Ren Zhengfei boiled the core of Huawei's management philosophy to "grayscale theory". Ma Huateng also attributed Tencent's success to the "grayscale philosophy." Naïve people look at the world in a black-and-white dichotomy, just as a child watches a movie and always has to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. And one of the signs of maturity is to recognize gray and accept gray. Because gray is the normal development of everything in the world. The world is chaotic, we have never reached the truth of black and white, and reality is just a series of deep and shallow grayscales. The grey area, with its uncertainty, shows the paradox of the dichotomy, and its significance lies in its unnameability and inclusiveness. No simple definition can encompass the esoteric and complex nature of grayscale.
Gray is the most widely used in ancient Chinese architecture, so it has become one of the main colors in China. Mention the houses, mention the Great Wall, always a blue-gray impression. However, in ancient times, because gray meant chaos and impropriety, it was the lowest rank among the multitudes, which could be described as the color of ordinary people. In this way, a color has two fates, is disliked, but is used in large quantities. Gray is the simplest, so simple that the whole world is wrapped in it but does not care; gray is the most complex, so complex that all the colors on the palette can be mixed to get this chaotic beauty. Gray is ignored, but it occupies the fundamentals of life. Gray seems lifeless, but it is a thick energy, precipitating a long past and giving birth to new colors.
As the ancient capital of the Thirteen Dynasties, the old city of Xi'an is based on gray. If you come to Xi'an in autumn and winter, you will see the streets and alleys of Xi'an's old city, full of gray and misty ancient Chang'an afterglow. A leaf falls, Chang'an Hui, climb the green and gray Ming City Wall, the cold autumn wind blows away the bustle of summer, rows of red lanterns, swaying with the wind, 13.74 kilometers of square ancient city wall, you can rent a bicycle, the sunset slowly ride around the city. Or wait for the twilight to merge, walk along the moat under the city wall, listen to the historical afterglow of the whistling wind, and touch the rise and fall of Chang'an in the mottled green bricks for thousands of years. Looking up, the gray cloudy sky of Chang'an is like a light but full of deep ink. Time and space are suddenly frozen here, and the old houses of the houses along the streets of Shuncheng Lane are like old books, hiding a light blue-gray. You can turn into an alley and have a casual encounter with a café, a specialty restaurant, a family with a quilt, or a lazy kitten. There are also some old sofas and old chairs and stools that seem to have been abandoned in the alley, scattered everywhere, which can be cooled in summer and basked in the sun in winter. There are people who buy vegetables and cook, people who plant flowers and grass, people who gossip in pairs and twos, people who sing Qin dialects, and here is an eternal trivial life, and the fireworks in the world are dusty and hot.
In Xi'an, one moment I still feel that this city is too modern, and the next second it will be taken into another time and space... Who made Xi'an gray! It can't be too young, because how long it has been walking on earth has been stained with layers of dust. The gray tone of Xi'an has a certain vague sense of chaos, the culture is folded here, it is impossible to distinguish between the old and the new, the east and the west, and the things of different eras and different regions are all mixed together, but they ferment a unique cultural charm. In the quiet, faint gray atmosphere, you can't see its age, it never seems to age, there are always new things injected, colliding, bursting, and those precipitated, generation after generation of memories, pregnant with a calm atmosphere, unique urban charm.
Chaos is a unique human ability, but also a unique form of human nature and history. The higher the density of urban culture, the more gray tones should be? The dense sense of history is gray tones. After a thousand years of glitz and glitz, after countless ups and downs, the new and old, the middle and the west, the things of different eras and different regions, can only be mixed together in the gray caress, constituting a kind of chaos in the order, the balance between the chaos. In this grayscale world, there is no absolute black, there is no absolute white, only a series of deep and shallow gray levels, the more gray levels presented, the richer the level of the picture. This gray is the background color of the ancient capital, even if there are countless new shops, new residents, and various cultures, constantly integrated into the old city, it can not affect its calm and comfortable rhythm. Under the caress of gray, everything is alive. New, old, old, intertwined, jagged growth. For a long time, in the full and miscellaneous daily life, gray seems to be the way life is.