What color is the moon?

In the third grade, my art teacher once asked me to invite my parents to meet him, because of a very serious crime of daring to disobey the teacher. The thing is, the teacher gave the assignment: Draw a picture of the full moon night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Like my friends, I drew a scene of family life with a red-tiled house, a small yard with a few children playing, and the moonlight shining obliquely, dyeing the space. But my crime was that instead of drawing the moon yellow and the moonlight silver as usual, I painted the moon red, and the moonlight purple. The art teacher reminded me to correct it, but I insisted on defending my picture, saying that I saw the moon as red. “But the moon should be yellow. Everyone draws it like that!” - the teacher snapped.

From then on, whenever I looked up at the night sky, I would ask myself: What color is the moon anyway? And after all, since everyone else does it, should I do it too, regardless of whether I think otherwise?

At the age of 20, at a bookstore in Hue, I happened to see a book about the universe by Stephen Hawking. His research on parallel universes, inflationary universes, black holes... completely overturned my perception, putting me in front of countless doubts about creation; at the same time, he also planted in my mind the good seeds of belief in contradictory things.

I believe that there is a sky outside, there is a universe outside. I also believe that the moon, the sun, the clouds, the wind, the storm and the rain… can have many colors, not necessarily yellow, white, grey… Right and wrong, existence and non-existence, the obvious and the hidden, what we do and what we think… always have a very fragile, undefined boundary. Therefore, we must learn to accept the difference, learn to doubt our understanding and omniscience, learn to give vague hypotheses and assumptions a fragile trust…

Stephen Hawking's universe is so big, and I am so small, so although it is difficult, I try to escape from the imitative thinking, the imitative life according to the pattern as the art teacher said that everyone is like that. There is nothing wrong with everyone being like that, it is just that when everyone is like that, it is difficult for us to become ourselves, we see ourselves in everyone, and sometimes we do not even know who we are. Only when we clearly realize that we are a microscopic speck of dust in this vast universe, we will be afraid of the greatness of nature, to restrain our greed and live more kindly.

The days of isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic made me think more about this. Humans think they are great. We make planes and rockets. We research and manufacture torpedoes and nuclear weapons with terrifying destructive power. We can fly into the sky, dive into the sea, send people to live on the moon, and aspire to conquer the universe. We straighten rivers, bend streams, build bridges across the sea, destroy primeval forests, and build skyscrapers. We look at the development indexes and think we are good, talented, know everything, and have the ability to master everything. But just an extremely small virus can easily defeat human efforts, making us fragile, weak, and extremely helpless.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that the color of the moon is probably not as important as how we think about the differences in our perception of the moon. For one person, the moon may be red, for another, the moon may be blue. It doesn’t matter, what matters is knowing how to accept the differences, the urge to think differently and innovate, to break free from the boundaries and prejudices of the crowd.