Grey

I was reading an article about fencing garb recently, which was talking about why regular fencers wear white but coaches wear black. It was smart enough to realise the answer was "laundry", but got things a bit mixed up.

This article suggested that regular fencers wear white but the superior coaches wear black to show the superiority of the coaches' laundry. This is supposedly because it's easier to keep whites white and harder to keep blacks black, but the truth is white is a massively difficult colour to maintain. Most sporting gear for "posh sports" (fencing, cricket, tennis...) went white roughly the same time not because it's easy to maintain but because it shows you have staff who can put serious time and effort into doing your laundry, or you have the money to send your clothes away to be laundered every day. You'll notice more working class sports like football tend to have multi-coloured clothing - it shows the stains less, so you can get away with washing it at home, without being able to afford to send your clothes away to a professional laundry.

Yes, proper black is harder to maintain than white if your main form of washing laundry is boiling clothes in a lye solution and pounding the heck out of them, but bright whites are a hard thing to manage.

In fact, everything wants to be grey. Your blacks want to fade to grey and your whites want to dull to grey. It's where they naturally settle after time, if nature has its way. As for coloured garments, anything with a cool colour (like blues) tend towards grey, while everything with warm colours (like reds and purples) goes to brown.

Grey and brown are like water (or, perhaps grey is water while brown is earth). In the Tao Te Ching it is noted that the Tao is like water, which will always seek the lowest point and find its level. Water doesn't struggle against nature, it flows with it, and in doing so it eventually overcomes anything that is standing in its way. You don't see a puddle forming on the side of a hill, it finds someplace level, or the water stays in constant motion, gently pushing through, around or over anything holding it back.

Like the line in the old Shaker song Simple Gifts, water comes down to where it ought to be. That's part of the essential concept of the Tao - that you don't strive against nature, but flow with it until you come down to where you ought to be.

Sooner or later, all colours will become grey or brown, and anything that is grey or brown will be in constant motion - never quite the same shade for long, as it interacts with the world around it. This is what they ought to be.

Grey and brown are, in a way, the colours of the Tao.