Prompt Four

A Kaleidoscope of Perspectives

            Kaleidoscopes are fascinating instruments comprised of a cylindrical body, mirrors, and multi-colored objects. As light reflects off these tiny mirrors, brilliant patterns appear and seem to move as the angles of light reflect differently. Like a kaleidoscope, a person’s worldly experience can be influenced by the angle of perspective they choose, willingly or unwillingly, to adopt. In the English language, this matter of perspective is known as “seeing life through rose-colored glasses.” If an individual has this outlook on life, they imagine the world around them as how they think it might or should be instead of how it actually is. In reality, it is not the world that has altered in the literal sense, but how the person perceives and interprets their surroundings.

            In the “Kant” chapter of Sophie’s World, Alberto applies this concept by having Sophie try on a pair of literal rose-colored glasses. After donning the glasses, Sophie still saw everything she saw before, but this time it was all in various hues of red. Everything was not truly red, however, but the way she perceived the world around her was restricted by the glasses she was wearing. Kant himself believed that two important factors were required for our complete perception of the world: “sensing” and “reason.” Like the empiricists, Kant concurred that sensations contribute to our knowledge of the world, but there also determining influences in our reason that affect how discern our world. Some of these influences can be experienced to a universal extent or on more personal level.

            On a universal scale, everyone, myself included, adopts a pair of red-tinted glasses as they mature and age. When we are little children, we perceive the world around us as a giant, uncharted territory that must be explored, and we are its conquistadors. This is because children are still innocent and do not understand certain concepts, such as that the world can be an awfully sinister and hazardous place. However, as children begin to mature and form their own opinions and beliefs with time, they start to regard the world around them in a different light. For example, while a five-year-old may squeal with delight at the sight of a rusty playground, a sixteen-year-old might be wary of catching tetanus or the possibility of falling through the weakened monkey bars. The reason the sixteen-year-old knows this is because they have either learned through experience or comprehend the dangers that are everywhere in life; the five-year-old, on the other hand, is akin to a clean canvas that has never experienced the beauty of paint, and therefore does not know the wiser. Thus, maturity is just one of many rose-colored glasses that assisting in shaping an individual’s standpoint on life.

              Although some pairs of rose-tinted glasses are relative to the majority of the population, some others can only be experienced by a select group of people personally. For instance, my personal glasses are my intense fear of driving. This stemmed from my sixteen-year-old cousin’s death, who was killed in a violet car crash roughly two years ago, with one of his friends at the wheel; it was just a couple of weeks before he got his own license. Ever since then, my perspective on driving has altered dramatically, especially when I have other people in the car. In fact, my fear was so bad at first that when the time came to get my license, I balked at the opportunity, opting to wait a little longer. I was determined that before I got my license, I would make sure to have extra experience driving to avoid a similar fate. Even now, I am still paranoid whenever I drive and sometimes I tense up because I get nervous about making a turn or crossing a busy intersection. Lastly, now when I hear about people being killed in a car accident, it affects me a lot more than it did before, especially since I know what my family and I went through.

            Briefly, every individual has a certain way he or she looks at the world around them. This experience of the world can be affected by a multitude of things, such as culture, sex, ethnicity, race, religion, or private conflicts and experiences. Either way, there is no right or wrong way to experience life, and everyone perceives the world from behind at least one or more pairs of rose-colored glasses at some point or another. With this said, the real question is how much do we let our glasses govern our perspective on life when we can choose to think differently? As Abe Lincoln once said, “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses."