The Kaleidoscope of Your Life

“Wherever you go, there you are.”
- Confucius

Every casebook needs a mystery; a true whodunnit. Sadly, we tend to embark on solving our greatest mysteries, including the mystery we’re investigating together, without a real starting point. Our biggest questions are more easily felt as an ache in the chest, a pulsing in the mind, a fatigue in the limbs – than put into words. 

I was in the tangle of some question-feelings last year while reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time. I sat up straighter and leaned in when the protagonists began seeking the answer to “The Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” – more a feverish demand from a genie than a question, but still something we would all like to know.

The accurate response, eventually provided by the most advanced computer in the universe, is not something I’ll ruin for you if you haven’t read it. Suffice it to say that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything turns out to be succinct, nonsensical, intriguing, and for desperate minds, supremely frustrating. The kind of frustration that makes you growl and laugh at the same time.

Learning it sparks a new quest – to uncover the question that will explain such an answer.

This suggests that only with a clear question, felt or said, can we make sense of the answers we have already gathered. And I’m sorry to report that, like the Hitchhikers themselves, all we have are a collection of seemingly unrelated answers. Or are they?

Puzzle Piece One: A Hall of Mirrors, circa 1999

Wherever you go, there you are. I am nine years old at the Calgary Stampede, in mid-July. I’m probably overheated and dehydrated, but I’m a kid, so I don’t really care. My babysitter has brought six or seven of us and set us loose in the carnival area that includes a funhouse with a hall of mirrors. With a belly full of gummy candy and fried donuts, I set off through the mirrored labyrinth.

It’s not a very good hall of mirrors – The Stampede has been going on for days, and no one’s bothered to wipe off the handprints, and occasional face print, left by people running into solid walls like birds into windows. The mirrors themselves are cheap, cracked, and concave (from the aforementioned collisions), reflecting bizarro shapes. 

But my childish sense of direction and spatial awareness is still adequately bamboozled. I’ve been let in with a group of loud, confident teenagers who are racing around whooping and shoving each other, making escape an urgent matter. I feel my way forward like a blind person, surrounded by myself on all fronts. I catch my wide-eyed reflection again and again as I spin, turn, become more frantic – stretched tall, widened, twisted. 

There I am. There I am. There I am.

I am everywhere, and I’m just looking for where I am not, for that, I feel assured, is the way out of this mess.

Puzzle Piece Two: T’s Kaleidoscope-Spyglass, circa 2023

Wherever you go, there you are. I have a friend, T., who thoughtfully processes the events in his life. This is a trait I admire very much, because it takes a lot of courage and humility to reassess one’s stories and past assumptions in the name of gaining a greater understanding of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Sometimes when he recalls his experiences in a new way, he unconsciously mimics holding what appears to be a spyglass to his eye, squeezing the other shut like a pirate looking out to sea. But in fact, what he’s demonstrating is a kaleidoscope. He turns and turns this kaleidoscope as he expresses what, how, and why he has changed his mind.

What is he seeing in there? As the patterns and colours churn and reform into new entities, I can’t help but wonder what is shifting form. When he sees events and people differently, is he changing those events and people? Surely not, for they continue on unfettered, as they have always been.

Is he changing himself fundamentally, altering his perspective or the essence of his being like an alchemist turning scrap metal into gold? What an insult, to think that anyone’s essence begins as scrap metal. My instinct is that we are gold to begin with, exposing a glimmer of my own hidden optimism.

But something is changing, isn’t it, as the kaleidoscope turns? Maybe it’s a spyglass after all. Or maybe it’s both at the same time. I warned you about mixed metaphors. 

Bear with me. Something is coming into sharper focus on the horizon now, in the form of a succinct, intriguing, and nonsensical answer. It isn’t the first time this has happened, as we can see from our evidence file.

T. turns and turns the kaleidoscope-spyglass, and in doing so moves closer towards what I once sought to escape.

There he is, there he is, there he is.

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