Which Color Are You?

Raman Trehan
3 min readJul 20, 2019

Do you remember what Dr. House said about humanity in the first episode while diagnosing if a tumor is there? No one does.

Very rarely does it happen that a TV show hits me. I rarely manage to get time to pick a TV show (Game of Thrones, Narcos, and Big Bang Theory being the exceptions). This one hit me really hard last week. I was watching S01E05 from “This Is Us” and what Manny said towards the end of the episode grabbed my attention the same way “Paris Agreement” captured the world.

I do not wish to write in my own words since that would give redirection to what Manny wanted to convey. It goes like this:

“Life is full of color and we each get to come along and we add our own color to the painting, you know? And even though it’s not very big — — the painting — — you sort of have to figure that it goes on forever, you know, in each direction? So, like, to infinity, you know. ’Cause that’s kinda like life. It’s really crazy, if you think about it, that a hundred years ago some guy that I never met came to this country with a suitcase. He has a son, who has a son, who has me. So at first when I was painting I was thinking, you know, maybe that was that guy’s part of the painting and then down here that’s my part of the painting. And then I started to think… well… what if we’re all in the painting… everywhere? And what if we’re in the painting before we’re born? What if we’re in it after we die? And these colors that we keep adding, they just keep getting added on top of one another, ’til eventually we’re not even different colors anymore. We’re just… one thing. One painting. My dad, he’s not with us anymore. He’s not alive… but he’s with us. He’s with me every day. It all just sort of fits somehow, even if you don’t understand how yet. People will die in our lives — — people that we love. In the future. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe years from now. I mean, it’s kind of beautiful, right, if you think about it, the fact that just because someone dies, just because you can’t see them or talk to them anymore, it doesn’t mean they’re not still in the painting. I think maybe that’s the point of the whole thing. There’s no dying. There’s no ‘You’ or ‘Me’ or ‘Them.’ It’s just ‘Us.’ And this sloppy, wild, colorful, magical thing that has no beginning, has no end, it’s right here. I think it’s us”.

Boy, how I love the essence at the end. We all have faced situations in our lives where we have experienced our dear ones leaving us, could be permanent. But the context of considering everything as a painting gives a whole new perspective to life and death.

There is a head fake here. This article isn’t for you, it’s for me.

Go bears. Let’s make the prettiest painting out there while helping others color their own.

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Raman Trehan

● I play/teach drums ● Write scalable software systems ● Design product/business ideas