Every fall I am in awe of all the colors leaves turn into. The closer to death the more beautiful they become. We on the other hand often feel getting old means getting ugly and full of wrinkles, or worse, sick and helpless. Maybe we should think of aging in the context of green leaves slowly turning into an intense glowing red.

I encourage my students to pick a color of the day and keep looking out for that color during the day, in a gentle, relaxed and interested way (ideally without glasses or contacts). Looking for that color keeps us in the here and now, instead of being carried away by our thoughts, worrying about this or that, composing a to-do list in our minds…

Instead of focusing on what we don’t see we can relax into noticing what we do see: our color! It’s suddenly everywhere! How strange… well, it’s not really that strange. We just asked our mind to notice and not to think or judge. That makes a big difference, we might be caught by surprise about how much detail suddenly appears. It’s this positive attitude to seeing that we need to “heal” our vision. My color today was the intense wine red of the right leaf. What is yours?