Just heard Grandma let out a rather sudden hiss that cut through the afternoon quiet like a blade through silk. She is sitting alone at the kitchen table, no book before her, no radio playing, no conversation partner to provoke displeasure. Yet something has reached across time to touch her – some fragment of memory so vivid that her body responds before her conscious mind can intervene. This didn’t make sense to my teenage mind at the time. Today, while washing at the kitchen sink, I suddenly gasped in discomfort, remembering a totally random moment from two years ago. Then, I remembered Grandma, and my puzzle to her arbitrary hiss in my teen years.

These involuntary expressions punctuate adult life like unexpected punctuation marks in an otherwise coherent sentence. A colleague is wincing at his desk for no visible reason; a woman on the subway lets out a small laugh, then immediately covers her mouth; a fatherly-looking old man within my line of sight is shaking his head violently while staring into space, as if trying to dislodge a persistent fly on his nose that only he can see. We have become unwitting performers in a play written by our past selves, our bodies serving as stages for dramas that concluded years or decades ago. The hiss, the sigh, the headshaking, or sudden grimace – none of these reactions are chosen responses from us, but rather compulsive eruptions from some deeper place where our memories live in our muscles, in our bones, and where the past refuses to behave like the past and insists instead on its continued presence.

i. What do elevators and trains have in common? Nothing.
One of my favorite things to do is look into the eyes of little kids. Their stares are usually blank and adorably clueless. I see the same stare in puppies and just about all younglings of every species. Look into the eyes of an adult of any species, though. Apart from seeing intent in their eyes, there is also a sliver of knowing in their look, as though every gaze bears the imprint of interaction history. Children move through time like trains on tracks, always facing forward, each moment leading predictably to the next. Breakfast flows into morning cartoons, which give way to playground adventures, then lunch, then naptime, then dinner, then the protest against bedtime… a linear progression as reliable as the sun’s journey across the sky. Their anticipation is always for what comes next: the weekend, the birthday party, the summer vacation. Memory, for them, is shallow water, barely covering their ankles. But somewhere in our thirties, the architecture of time undergoes a fundamental renovation. We stop moving horizontally like trains and begin to exist vertically, like elevators in a shaft that spans decades. Any moment can suddenly drop us three floors to that failed job interview, or shoot us up to the penthouse of our wedding day, or leave us suspended between floors, remembering something that might have happened in 1993 or 2005. The years blur together like passing scenery. Monday morning becomes not just Monday morning but all Monday mornings, especially that one when we said the wrong thing, or the one when we said exactly the right thing. We wake not into a fresh day but into a palimpsest where every today is written over countless yesterdays, the ink bleeding through, making the present text difficult to read.

ii. Wee goes the pendulum
This kaleidoscope of memories can be a blessing or a curse, a burden or a gift, or both at the same time – though it’s often hard to distinguish which is what. Each year, each experience, each encounter, like a thin layer of film, adds more colored fragments to the tube; moments of triumph and humiliation, love and loss, wisdom and folly. With every turn, these pieces fall into new configurations. The same memory of dropping our lunch tray in the high school cafeteria can appear one day as a crystal of pure mortification, making us physically cringe twenty years later, and the next day as a gem of comedy, evidence of our endearing humanity.

This accumulated consciousness can sometimes get in the way of experiencing anything purely anymore; every sunset can be compared to other sunsets, every loss can echo previous losses, and every joy can be both amplified and diminished by the joys that came before. Our eyes now bear the instant recognition from history – the colors of those thin-layered imprints that have shaped our present day. Gone are the blank stares and adorable cluelessness. We have become repositories of experiences, walking libraries of sensations and emotions, and sometimes the sheer volume threatens to overflow; and in fact, does occasionally – ever let out a scream or shout randomly for no apparent reason?

Adding to the beautiful terror of these accumulations is that we can never quite predict which pattern will emerge when we wake each morning. Will today’s configuration show us as heroes of our own story or as fools? Will the light catch the brilliant moments or illuminate the fractures? The kaleidoscope doesn’t care about our preferences. It simply turns, endlessly creating new meanings from the same raw materials of our lived experience.

iii. Please… no more [while rubbing your head].
There’s a crucial distinction between the memories we choose to summon and those that summon themselves. We might deliberately recall a first kiss with someone we deeply cared about, carefully reconstruct the scene like a detective at a crime scene. Involuntary memories, on the other hand, operate by entirely different laws. They ambush us in the produce aisle when the particular green of the lettuce matches the color of a dress worn by someone we haven’t thought about in years. It strikes while we’re brushing our teeth, and suddenly we’re not forty-three but fourteen, experiencing again the precise texture of embarrassment from a moment we thought we had forgotten.

As the years amass, along with the assortment of experiences that come with aging, we seem to transition from what little control we might have imagined ourselves having as the operators of our mental kaleidoscope to becoming its subjects, even its victims. We wake up already in mid-rotation, the pattern of today’s recalls already in formation before our wakeful consciousness fully returns. The mysterious sighs of old granny make sense in this context. She’s not choosing to revisit whatever moment provokes her hiss; rather, the moment is revisiting her, uninvited and unevictable. Long goes the hiss. But is the hiss at the unwelcomed thought? Or is it at her own helplessness to evict the rogue thought? The morning seldom waits for us to be ready; it arrives already colored by a dream we can’t quite remember, or by a memory that chooses this particular dawn to reassert itself. We become passengers in our own minds, watching the scenery of our past roll by, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible, but always beyond our complete control.

iv. Observer or observed?
Our reinterpretations of life through this kaleidoscopic existence make the nature of selfhood itself quite fascinating. Are we the sum of these shifting patterns, the aggregate of all these configurations of memories and experiences? Or are we the consciousness that observes the patterns, something separate from and beyond the endless rotation of remembered moments? When I cringe at a memory of my twenty-year-old self’s arrogance, who exactly is cringing? The person I am now seems to stand apart from that earlier self, judging, evaluating, feeling embarrassment on behalf of someone who no longer exists. Yet that separation is an illusion. I am both the observer and the observed, the judge and the defendant, the kaleidoscope and the eye that peers through it.

This double existence might be what distinguishes our adult consciousness from our childhood’s simpler state. As children, we were fully immersed in being ourselves; as adults, we develop this strange capacity to stand outside ourselves, to watch ourselves remembering, and remember ourselves watching. We become our own audience, critics of our own performance, and this self-reflection adds yet another layer to the kaleidoscope – not just the memories themselves but our memories of remembering, our thoughts about our thoughts, an infinite regression of consciousness observing itself.

v. Seismic shifts
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of memory’s kaleidoscope is how unstable our past proves to be. We imagine our memories as fixed, like photographs in an album, but lived experience suggests something far more fluid and ever-changing. The business failure that devastated us on Wednesday morning might strike us as liberating by Thursday afternoon. The relationship that seemed like our greatest mistake can transform, through the subtle shift of the kaleidoscope and rearrangement of its colors, into the necessary prelude to our current happiness.

This isn’t simply about gaining perspective or the healing power of time. It’s about the fundamental indeterminacy of experience itself. The past, it turns out, is still happening, still capable of surprising us with new meanings. That moment of social awkwardness that made us want to disappear entirely last summer might, this summer, reveal itself as evidence of our authenticity, our refusal to perform social scripts. The kaleidoscope suggests that nothing is ever finished, no story ever completely told. Even our most ancient memories can suddenly reveal a new facet, catch the light differently, or show a pattern we had never noticed before. This fluidity might be maddening. How can we know who we are for sure if our past keeps changing? It is, however, also oddly hopeful. If even our worst moments can be reconfigured, if even our failures can reveal themselves as strange gifts, then perhaps we are not as trapped by our history as we sometimes feel.

vi. The morning lottery
Good morning. Is it? Each morning presents itself as a kind of lottery. Before we open our eyes, our mind has already been turning in our sleep, and we never know which configuration of self we’ll wake into. Will today’s pattern emphasize our competence or our inadequacy? Will the first conscious moment bring a warm memory of achievement or a cold reminder of failure? It feels sometimes like the mood is being chosen for us by a consensus outside our reach, as if our memories have held a committee meeting in the night and decided: today you will be the person who once said that brilliant thing at exactly the right moment, or today you will be the person who failed to recognize when someone needed help. The arbitrariness of this selection process, why this memory today and not that one?… remains an uncomfortable mystery. We dress ourselves each morning not knowing which past self will accompany us through the day, which ghost will tap us on the shoulder during the afternoon meeting, which ancient embarrassment will bloom fresh as we try to fall asleep that night.

vii. Embrace it
Yet for all its challenges, the kaleidoscopic mind offers a unique form of beauty. Just as a physical kaleidoscope creates complex patterns from simple fragments, our being creates meaning from the broken pieces of experience. No single memory tells the whole story. Only in its endless recombination with other memories and new experiences does something approaching truth frailly begin to emerge. We are not just our triumphs or just our failures, not just our wise moments or just our foolish ones, but the entire turning apparatus, the whole complex mechanism that contains all these possibilities simultaneously. The adult mind, with its tendency toward spontaneous sighs and unexpected winces, its vulnerability to ambush by the past, its strange relationship with time, might be seen not as a burden but as an achievement. The capacity to hold multiple versions of ourselves simultaneously, to be both the child looking forward to dinner and the adult remembering looking forward to dinner, to exist in all times at once. The kaleidoscope turns, and we turn with it, creating new patterns from old materials, finding fresh meanings in ancient moments, discovering that we are both less and more than we thought… less fixed, less certain, less singular, but more complex, more surprising, more capable of transformation even in remembering what has already transformed us.

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