Kaleidoscope Essay -- Descriptive Essays

KaleidoscopeSome are transformed just once / And live their whole lives after in that shape. / Others have a facility for changing themselves as they please. -OvidIt finds its way into my handsthe small kaleidoscopea trinket my grandfather passes along to me after finding it at the bottom of his toolbox one afternoon. Hold it up to the light, Lauren, he advises me, upon witnessing my attempts to unlock the kaleidoscopes magic by aiming it towards the shadowy pavement. With hands clasped, eyes squinted, and head cocked, I finally spot the colouring materialed chips, a glisten lattice of blue, green, and yellow, stagnantly arranged and defined. Turn it, now, my grandfather orders, smiling. Suddenly, the clear composition unravels. It becomes a moving color war, triangles and rectangles interacting, skirting around one another to form patterns that fall behind only fleetingly before changing again. I g asp, intrigued. Thats the beautiful part, my grandfather observes. Its beautiful when its turning.The challenge of cleaning out my desk drawers in preparation for the move to New York results in my stumbling across an old coloring book. I leaf through the pages, startled by the number of pictures Id left only partially colored. With quick, shaky movements, it seems as if I had simply jumped from shading one image to the next, as if there were something complete about departure the figures incomplete. Sitting at my desk, fourteen years older, I laugh at my rendition of Big Bird, whose characteristically yellow feathers I had made blue and whose feet (I reckon I had decided) were altogether undeserving of color. And yet I get a sense that thi... ... of wholeness, but the acceptance that Ill always be a work-in-progress that creates the upstanding illusion of completeness.Although ignorant of his own words, my grandfather has gotten it right It is beautiful when its turning. We, as human beings, are not able to ossify what we perceive to be our identity it will be forever changinga kind of surreal, confounding, and complex reflection of our human experience. We possess innumerable facets, like little tubes of color that remain separate until some creative force removes all the caps and mixes them together. It is that mlange that initiates a masterpiece of identitya masterpiece that is ever changing and neer quite finished, but fulfilling in its progression. And it is precisely this understanding that makes the next stroke of the brush a little bit clearer, the portrait itself a bit to a greater extent revealing.