Colors and misunderstanding

You can never describe colors. But try. Then you might be aware that it is possible... in a way.

Look at the picture. Cottony layers of pearly-colored clouds, dark purple at the top, brighter pink stripes near the horizon, in between is a gradation of various blues, milky blue to dark grayish blue, ... you can go on, like forever.

If you tell your daughter the scene this way or other, she will try to picture whatever colors that your words invoke in her mind, recollecting some of the scenes she has ever seen. It may be a lonely sunset she saw on her way home from school with a heavy rucksack on her back, or hopeful sunrise on a very cold new years day... May not the same may not even close to the colors you described.
But still you told her some of the reality you saw. Now she knows you saw something strikingly beautiful and she herself recalled something of an equivalent beauty she has seen in her life. Your efforts are not totally wasted after all.

Even if we look at the same picture with the same color we are looking at different pictures in different colors. We often see colors as simple as red, green, blue, yellow with our individual preoccupied notion of colors. Then we fail to see it as is. There are incredibly different hues when we see "green" of a tree. But we often ignore them.
Our communication is more or less like this. We can't really communicate without tons of misunderstandings. But we are hardly aware of it. We may always want to believe that things should be understood by communication.
But isn't it this misunderstanding, where we can catch our breath and where we can be ourselves?