Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

A woman walks down the sidewalk, coffee in hand, unconsciously frowning at the bustle on the street. Everyone is going somewhere, everyone knows what they are doing. She follows them.

“I hope I look the same,” she thinks.

The woman steps into a gray office building. The receptionist greets her, they talk about their time off work. The receptionist already longs for the next weekend. The woman walks on to her cubicle.

The cubicle has always been the same. She walks in, sits down. Gray walls. Gray paperwork. Gray clouds peering into the office scene to spy at the woman through the one small window on the gray wall. She types something onto her desktop. She glances at the snow globe on her desk, the only fragment of reality that is tangible to the woman. A brief glimmer passes through her eyes as she watches it, recalling the elderly relative who brought it back for her from a land far away. It is perched on a bright-red stand and vivid rainbow coloured snowflakes dance around the picturesque beach inside of it.

The ticking of a clock knocks her out of this reverie.

The clock strikes ten.

The woman stands up, walks over to the gray kitchen to fill her cracked white mug with bitter black coffee. She sits down again and types more gray sentences that she does not understand. The geometrically perfect black lines on her spreadsheet begin to blur, mixing in with the white background like an ash-coloured oil spill. She blinks a few times. The woman looks up at the dull white light fixture above her cubicle. She searches it for details she might have missed before. She types again.

The clock strikes twelve, the woman eats a lunch of leftovers. She fills her cracked, now coffee-stained mug. She watches her spreadsheet. She blinks, rubs her eyes. She focuses on the big light above her cubicle instead of the souvenir from the land far away. The snow globe is only a distraction; she glances away from it at all costs. The woman watches the light, looks down, and types some more.

At two o’clock, she does not get up. She watches the blurring lines of her spreadsheet, her fingers removed from the keyboard. She knows the lines are perfectly straight, black and solid, but all she sees are their dark shadows dancing on the white background. No color. An oil spill on a clean beach of pristine white sand. She blinks repeatedly, unable to see clearly. She rubs her eyes until they ache. She stretches up her neck to watch the dull light fixture.

She glues her gaze to it, but the crystal ball-shaped memory calls to the woman from its corner of the desk. She watches the light fixture, but she no longer sees its grayish white glow. A rainbow of colors now dance in its place, growing more vibrant with every confused squint of the woman’s eyes. Now, she only sees the snow globe. Though she watches the light, she can only feel the warmth of the faraway beach that she had never explored. She can only watch the show of vivid colors dancing around her. This memory, one that was never hers, is all her senses can perceive.

The woman stands up on her desk chair. She can see the entire floor of office workers.

Like on her spreadsheet, the rows of perfectly straight, square cubicles begin to move before her eyes, blending in with the floor, the gray walls, the gray people. They all dance before her like a burning street in a heatwave. In her head, though, the myriad of colors still thrives.