A Kaleidoscope of Song

Last week’s blog post was a meditation on the disquiet we sometimes feel during the holiday season. I tried to acknowledge that all aspects of the season are valid. They all exist simultaneously—the joy, the simplicity, the frenetic pace, the nostalgia. We can’t expect to feel one certain way. It’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope of sensations and emotions.

As you know, a kaleidoscope is created with pieces of colorful broken glass, placed in a cylinder, with mirrors and prisms opposite a viewing hole. When looking through the eye piece, the bits of glass transform into a scintillating pattern of color. Turn the kaleidoscope, and the pattern shifts as the pieces of glass fall into different spaces, reflecting and refracting light in new ways. All the infinitely possible patterns are made up of the same shards of colored glass.

I invite you to look at your life this way. All the bits of your time here on earth, placed in a container, shaken, can then be viewed as a beautiful patterned whole. Cover one eye, tilt your head, or turn the tube slightly, and the pattern changes. One aspect of your life comes to the fore as others retreat. Look at your life one way, and it’s all purples and blues. Shift your perspective, and now there is yellow, orange, and green.

When Harvey was well, and our family was living our idyllic life, I saw my life through a particular rosy lens. When Alzheimer’s disease made an appearance, my bright life and heart were shattered into shards of broken pieces. My kaleidoscope was shaken, and the way I viewed our life shifted, and the disease became the predominant color. As the disease progressed, the patterns were constantly changing. Soon after he passed away, my view shifted again. And now, settling into my life as a single, retired grandmother, my kaleidoscope has taken on completely different hues and patterns.

Those bits and pieces of my past are still there—the rosy tones, the dark blues, the vibrant greens, and the angry reds. They’ve rearranged themselves into new patterns. Some pieces are in the background. Occasionally, something shifts my perspective, and the deep blue of sadness comes to the fore, or else the golden tinge of nostalgia colors my outlook. Mostly, joyous bright yellow is the predominant hue these days.

In this holiday season, if we are swinging from anxiety, to hope, to feeling overwhelmed, to feeling grateful, we can become unmoored. The schizophrenia of the season can make us feel that we have lost our footing, become ungrounded, or out of balance. The kaleidoscope keeps changing on us.

But if our stories were constant and without change, the song of our lives would be monotonous. This beautiful kaleidoscopic life is ours to treasure, one bright, shifting pattern at a time.