Have you ever woken up late in the morning, when the sun has fully risen, and the light that filters in through your window is no longer golden, but bright and white?
The feeling that such a moment brings is magnificent. When you close your eyes as the world is dark, and then open them to a brilliantly bright world, you truly understand the splendour of just a few rays of light.
Did you know that although light often appears to be white, it is actually made up of seven different colours? This is why you may sometimes see rainbows forming. It is because when the white sunlight strikes a raindrop, its various components split and become a beautiful rainbow with many different colours.
Our communities are much like rays of sunlight. They are made up of several different kinds of people who each have their own unique qualities and skills. However, we are all working towards one ultimate goal – to make this world brighter and more beautiful every single day.
It is not difficult to recognise and appreciate that we are all different people, especially when we live in a richly diverse country such as our own. It is a quite natural fact that no person on this planet is exactly identical to another. Yet, we find that so much of the conflict in our world stems from this very fact – that we are all different.
We strive together to become a dazzling cloak of light that covers this world, but instead we have become individual and broken fractals of coloured light that occasionally converge, then fall apart once more. Why is that so?
It is because we have unknowingly begun to aspire to homogeneity instead of unity. We realise that everyone is different, and yet we set the same goals for everyone. We realise that not everyone moves in the same way at the same time, and yet we want everyone to walk the same path to get to their destination.
We strive together to cover this world in a bright, white light. But have we stopped to consider whether this is all we want? A world that is bright, but without colour and uniqueness?
As young people, we can make this world into something more. Unity does not just mean that we need to blend together into one single white light. Instead, we can remain different while still working together, just like a rainbow. In a rainbow, you can see every single colour that is a part of it, and it does not take away from all it has to offer.
A rainbow offers this world hope and a promise for a better future without leaving behind or changing anyone, no matter who they are. We can be a rainbow too. All we have to do is remember to strengthen and depend on each other instead of falling into a single mould that produces a colourless generation.
