Last Thursday evening, hundreds of DU students packed Sturm Auditorium to watch one of the funniest movies in recent memory, “Superbad.”
As we sat in the seats, the aisles, the stairways and stood against the walls, watching and laughing as three nerdy high school guys made good and were popular for one crazy night, a resounding thought hit me.
For two hours, we were all back in high school. If we can go back there so easily, have we really changed that much since then? Can we ever really change our true colors?
With that in mind, I visited with a good friend after the movie. He shared that since high school he had battled and overcome addiction. But even in the telling of this hard story, it’s easy to see that his story and who he is as a person is beautiful, here and now. At long last, he has started to see his true colors, and though he ran from them and denied them through addiction-as we all tend to do in some way or another-he stands fast now, embracing himself, running no longer, and his true colors shine through as bright and as bold as ever. At the root of his addiction he found his true colors; after that, he didn’t need the addiction any more.
I’ve had a great opportunity to be a part of a philanthropy group at DU, Building Tomorrow, and it’s been an amazing lesson in expressing true colors. The members of this group, like many groups at DU, have come together to help people-in this case, Building Tomorrow plans to build a school in Uganda to help educate some of the 46 million kids in sub-Saharan Africa with no access to education. What I’m amazed with is that the people in this group show their colors so wonderfully as individuals, but even more breathtakingly as a group. Building Tomorrow has blended its collective colors and now sends those colors out across the world, so that DU’s crimson and gold will radiate brilliantly in the heart of Africa for years to come.
These life experiences show that no matter what we’ve been through since high school, no matter the lessons we’ve learned or the people who have come and gone in our lives, at our cores, we are still very much the same. Our true colors haven’t faded or run dry; rather, we have only discovered those colors more, and these colors do not change. As we continue to discover our true colors, we also discover that we express them differently as we come to understand them. They may not fade, but as we live our lives we see that they do blend together, and they create a perfect and unique masterpiece in each passing moment.
But just as high school has come and gone, so too will our time in college. While we will all surely have amassed an immense amount of knowledge by the time we receive our degrees, that knowledge will prove as useless as the paper our degrees are printed on if we do not find our own true colors-all the knowledge in the world will not save us from our own blindness. Conversely, if we truly see ourselves, all the knowledge in the world will only help us express ourselves more freely and accurately, just as knowledge about paint, brushes and canvases will only marginally help the artist create his masterpiece.
A professor of mine recently reminded me of a biblical passage: “Seek and ye shall find.” Taken quite literally, whatever you are searching for, you will encounter. So what, or who, are you searching for? And where are you looking? While the world is a beautiful place, and all the people in it likewise magnificent, nothing outside of yourself can find your true colors for you or serve as the end result of your search. Instead, anything we see in the world is merely a signpost of what is inside of us, right now-you are really seeing a reflection of yourself. The trick is to go to the source of it: you. Who are you? Do you seek only an answer to that question, or the true answer?
Only you can answer it. While our parents, best friends, siblings, mentors and professors can aid us on our way, only you can walk the path to discovering yourself. Only you know the truth of who you are. And only you can express these true colors.
If we can learn anything from the characters in “Superbad” it’s that we try to answer the same questions all our lives. Instead of hoping for a hilarious turn of events to answer our questions, perhaps we need only to quiet ourselves from the noise of life, to look inside of ourselves and find our own truth.
My favorite answer:”I am McLovin.”
What’s your answer?
