Sometime during my teens I watched the 1986 movie “Soul Man” starring C. Thomas Howell. He played a spoiled rich fella who, in order to get into Harvard after his wealthy family refused to pay for college, ingested drugs to make his skin darken. He thus looked African American and became eligible for a minority scholarship.

One of the scenes that resonated with me involved a white woman–played by Melora Hardin later of the television show “The Office”– who made it a mission to hook up with men of color.

She says dramatically to Howell’s character while she’s seducing him that she doesn’t see black or white, only shades of gray.

I thought this was droll because there’s something very poseur about the line and about the character. She seeks relationships for the very fact they’ll make her look and feel dangerous and rebellious to her wealthy and uptight family. In fact, at the end of the movie she uses a variation of that line with a Native American man. She replaces “black” with “red” and “gray” with “pink.”

It’s easier by far to see and sometimes experience life as black and white or red and white. The grays so often make things confusing and it’s often the grays that keep us awake at night or sitting on a boat staring at the ocean in contemplation. But the grays don’t exist without the black or white, the white doesn’t exist without the black and grays, and so on and so forth.

To get a gray shadow or to get a darkness, you need a bright light. Extremes make life exciting.

They also make it challenging. Oh don’t they make it challenging?

Remember back in the day when people would try over and over to adjust the contrast on television sets? A little too much dark and the scene would vanish into a smudge. A little too much light and the scene would vanish in a flash of brightness.

You can spend your life trying to get the right balance between intense and quiet. The goal is to find that balance I suppose. But the darks and lights are essential if you want to create the perfect blend of gray that makes us happy and gray that makes us ponder and pontificate.

What about you? Do you have too much light? Too much dark? Too much gray and shadow? Or not enough gray and shadow?

Because unlike Hardin’s character in Soul Man, we can’t claim to see only those shades of gray or pink. We see and feel all shades along the spectrum—all the way from one extreme to another.