The Flower Model
While daydreaming in maths class, Tom absent-mindedly doodles a question mark in his exercise book. It doesn't take long before it gives him an idea. Having found himself in a world made up of four Colour Districts, each with its own coloured exclamation mark—all originating from the very same question mark—he sketches the following model that evening:
Tom sees the question mark as the symbolic source from which everyone's search for the right answer once began. Long ago, everyone in Colour Village was asked the same question: "What is most important for the whole of Colour Village?" Their different answers eventually gave rise to the four Colour Districts—the Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow Districts. Today, each district sees its own exclamation mark as the only true answer.
Tom begins to wonder whether any single exclamation mark can ever represent the whole picture—or possess the whole truth. Instead, each has its own value and is needed to complete the whole. Without every part, the whole is no longer complete. We need one another if we are ever to understand the bigger picture—if that's even possible.
Tom imagines that the ideal would be for everyone, at least in their minds, to return to the source: the question of what matters most in life. Each person would bring their own knowledge, wisdom, and experiences. Then, in the real world, they could meet in a joyful atmosphere to learn from one another, symbolically dancing together around a campfire.
To illustrate this return to the source, Tom draws arrows leading back from each coloured exclamation mark to the central question mark. But then he adds one more thing: a large exclamation mark after the question mark itself. The result is the symbol ?!, which Tom comes to see as the symbol of eternal wonder.
But then another key figure enters the story: Ben, the old inventor and hermit, who has spent the past twenty years trying to design a pair of Multi-Colour Glasses for everyone in Colour Village. The reason is simple: every villager wears either glasses with half-coloured lenses (matching their own district, of course) or coloured contact lenses. The trouble is that, over time, the glasses begin to stick to your face, and if you're not careful, your coloured contact lenses may become impossible to remove. That is why Ben has devoted himself to creating a new kind of glasses: crystal-clear prescription lenses set in a frame made up of several different colours. Not that anyone in Colour Village is particularly interested in wearing them.
Yet Ben has also been fascinated by exactly the same symbolic idea that Tom discovers: that the four coloured exclamation marks are simply four different answers to one and the same central question mark. What Ben realises, however, is that each Colour District is itself divided into two parts. At the very end of each tram line, the districts split into a light and a dark variation of the same colour. In the Red District, for example, there is Light Red and Dark Red, the latter representing a more extreme version of the same viewpoint.
With this in mind, the old inventor designed a more abstract version of the model. He replaced the four colours with the letters A to D, and added the numbers 1 and 2: 1 representing the lighter variation of a colour and 2 the darker, more extreme one. Thus, A1 represents Light Red, while A2 represents Dark Red. His more detailed model looks like this:
When Tom sees this, he quickly realises what it means. The shared journey he envisions—a return from every exclamation mark back to the source—can be imagined as one great arrow embracing all four branches. They begin in the centre... and, in the end, return there as well:
In Book One, Tom and the Colour Village and the Old Man, Tom completes a symbolic journey. He begins in the very centre of Colour Village, driven by questions, and returns there at the end of the story to celebrate with friends from all four Colour Districts. In doing so, he follows the very movement represented by his own Flower Model.
The journey ends with a joyful celebration in Ben's garden, the symbolic centre of the story. Around a campfire, the Colour Gangmembers share their personal knowledge, wisdom and experiences, learning from one another as they dance together. An idealistic vision of the future, captured in one surprisingly simple symbol...
A flower!
From there, you're free to interpret this abstract model in your own way... and perhaps even discover how it relates to different aspects of our own world. 😉