Kaleidoscope Essay -- Descriptive Essays

KaleidoscopeSome are transformed just once / And eff their whole lives after in that shape. / Others have a facility for ever-ever-changing themselves as they please. -OvidIt finds its way into my handsthe small kaleidoscopea trinket my gramps passes along to me after finding it at the bottom of his toolbox unrivalled 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 dent the colored chips, a glittering lattice of patrician, green, and yellow, stagnantly arranged and defined. Turn it, now, my granddaddy orders, smiling. Suddenly, the clear composition unravels. It becomes a moving color war, triangles and rectangles interacting, skirting near one another to form patterns that linger only fleetingly before changing again. I gasp, 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 inspire to New York results in my stumbling across an old coloring book. I finger through the pages, startled by the number of pictures Id odd 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 fewthing complete about leave 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 suppose I had decided) were alto placeher undeserving of color. And yet I get a sense that thi... ... of wholeness, besides the acceptance that Ill always be a work-in-progress that creates the satisfying illusion of completeness.Although ignorant of his own words, my grandfather has gotten it salutary It is beautiful when it s turning. We, as human beings, are not commensurate to ossify what we perceive to be our identicalness it will be ceaselessly changinga kind of surreal, confounding, and complex reflection of our human experience. We receive 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 never 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 more revealing.