Rainbows vs Reality
by Laurence Shorter
Gazing at a rainbow recently with my kids, it occurred to me that rainbows are a great example of something that is obviously both real and not real at the same time. Everyone sees their own rainbow in a slightly different position from everyone else and – as you know – it is not really ‘there’.
Rainbows poke holes in our assumptions about the solidity of things; they are a kind of wink from the other side of the matrix. In a world that is increasingly measurable and mechanistic, they are undeniably weird.
As a result they have always evoked wonder – in the West as a symbol of the contract between God and humans, in ancient Chinese culture as sky dragons or omens of disruption. Why do people in 2024 still stop and stare at rainbows? I am willing to bet it’s not just because they are beautiful.
So I stood in that field while my kids played and argued, and started thinking about rainbows as a metaphor for reality, for all the things in our lives that look solid and fixed – objects, situations, problems, limitations – but may not be as real as we believe.
If rainbows exist only inside our senses, what about everything else? The evidence that our problems might not be 100% real is hanging right there in the sky (on the right kind of day).
Diving into this back home, I found a vortex of philosophical articles online about the ontology of various objects that exist primarily in our perception (e.g. holes, skies, sunsets). Important: there is a kind of person who knows how to use the word ‘ontology’ in company – I am not one of them.
But the fact that academics are paid to think about the ontology of anything for a living tells you that humans in this world are busy with an endless variety of things, which is cause for wonder in itself.
I don’t have a specific business or productivity insight to draw about this – although you could have a go at extrapolating coaching advice about reframing perspectives and/or the quantum field. The most important thing about rainbows is that they are blatantly mysterious and hallucinatory while also being prosaically real.
If you feel inclined to dive further into the rainbow rabbit hole you could dip into this wistful, pedantic and weighty treatise on the “Ontology of Rainbows” by Japanese academic Takashi Iida. It has sat unfinished on my desktop for months, if only because the title makes me smile every time I accidentally open the tab.
The very fact that it exists gives me hope.
