One of my spring chores this year is painting our fence. Last year, my fence painting project was the fence around the orchard at our son’s farm. My grandson and I painted that fence after spending several weeks repairing it. The fence where our son and his family moved in was white. When I asked our daughter-in-law what color she wanted the fence to be, she said red. I went to the farm store and bought a five-gallon bucket of red barn paint. It was an easy process. I know that barn red is a kind of earthy color, unlike candy apple red, a sought-after color for sports cars. Neither of them is quite the same as the red stripes in the flag of the U.S.A. None of those colors is the same as burgundy.

However, this spring’s fence painting project won’t involve red paint, though a red fence looks pretty good. In our yard, I’d like the fence to be brown. I went to the hardware store, got a color chart of solid stains, and brought it home to pick the color we wanted. The chart has three pages of brown paint chips, all with names you might not find in a box of coloring crayons. For example, kidskin is next to winter wood and is not the same as cameo or pebble. There is chamois and taupe. I think the color we will use is Mesa, which is not the same as Yucatan.

When discussing colors with family and friends, I often joke about growing up with a box that had only eight crayons. I eventually got a box with sixteen, but I never learned the names of all of the colors in the box with 64.

I’m pretty good with the basics of the color wheel, but when it starts to fan out with all of the sub colors, I tend to drift toward objects found in nature. I know the difference between the color of a banana and a peach. I can tell that a pineapple is not the same as a sunflower, and a bumblebee is not the same as a lemon. I would describe all as being shades of yellow, however.

Walking in the heritage forests around here, I experience a wide range of greens. Mosses are different colors than ferns, which come in many shades. Trees have various hues and appear different in different lights. I describe everything from mint to sage as being green. Lime is a different shade than emerald.

It takes quite a vocabulary to describe the colors that we perceive.

I’ve seen a chart online that reminds me of a color wheel that presents human emotions. Emotions, like colors, come in a wide variety of subtle variations. The emotion chart I am most familiar with has seven basic feelings at the center: happy, surprised, bad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and sad. Right away, I found that my emotions didn’t follow the chart closely. I see it as bad to be too broad of a category. I might think that anger feels bad in some situations, but those emotions aren’t even next to each other on the chart. I believe pain or hurt is a basic human emotion, but it doesn’t appear on the chart.

A quick search on the Internet will yield several emotion wheels that attempt to illustrate the range of human emotions. And for every emotion logged on someone’s chart, there are probably a dozen more words describing feelings that don’t appear there. Like colors, describing emotions requires an extensive vocabulary.

I am aware of my emotions and believe I possess a modicum of emotional maturity earned by decades of living. Still, it is easy to find words describing emotions unfamiliar to me. Altschmerz is weariness with the same old issues you’ve always had. Mal de coucou is the feeling of having an active social life but few close friends. Occhiolism describes the feeling that your perspective is too small. Ambedo is becoming wholly absorbed by sensory details.

I’m sure I could make up a few more names for feelings. There must be a word for “I just don’t care anymore.” Perhaps there is one for “I’ve written that sentence a dozen times and still can’t find the right words.”

Like color, not every person experiences emotions in the same way that others do. I met several people when I was associated with Black Hills Works who were neurodivergent. One person could not interpret basic signals from his own body. He did not know when he was hungry or tired or needed to use the bathroom. He did best when he followed a rigid schedule with meal times, bed times, and time to go to the toilet all scheduled and occurring at the same time each day. Another person found it very difficult to sense the emotions of another person. He couldn’t sense whether another person was happy, sad, angry, or amused.

Psychologists use the word alexithymia to describe the phenomenon of not being able to express one's feelings. The word is derived from Greek and translates roughly to “no words for emotions.” I don’t often have that experience, but there are occasions when I need to stop and think for a while before finding words to express my feelings. Sometimes, it just takes me some time to figure out my feelings.

Over the years of my job, where I got to know many people in many different situations, I learned that becoming confused about one’s emotions is common. Frequently, someone will present as angry when their emotional state is far more complex than a single word. For example, anger is a normal part of grief, but grieving people are often frightened by their anger and would describe it as quite different from righteous indignation.

Sometimes, I wonder if it is a bit like color. To be in touch with our feelings, we need a substantial vocabulary to describe them. I can feel positive and negative simultaneously, but I don’t always have a word for it.

Once the fence is painted, I will recycle the charts with all the colors. I’ll refer to my fence as brown, just as I refer to the walls in this room as gray.

What is the difference between grey and gray? Grey is a colour, whereas gray is a color.