She was someone who, in the flow of a conversation, could give you a headache, and then in the next sentence, make you blush bashfully.

She registered as some of the most complex people I’ve ever met. When you pieced together parts of her life, the picture that was created was somewhere in between a stained glass window and a kaleidoscope.

She was a minister for the Methodist Church. She was among the first wave of women to do so, and with her religious outlook, she didn’t just preach traditionalism; she preached progression. She was a staunch activist: be it for prisoners, Palestine, or the environment, and an unbreakable feminist. She’d watch CNN and do a puzzle at night. During the day, she would visit and counsel prisoners as a volunteer for the Pennsylvania Prison Society.

She was one of the most sociable people you’d meet. Always engaged in a conversation or often an argument, yet she lived isolated in the woods with only a handful of neighbors — half were bears. She loved her home and was a world traveler nonetheless. Her humor could be biting, but a few sentences later, she could say something that made you feel like the only person that mattered. She was full of colorful contradictions, a million fragments pieced together, with no opportunities lost.

The most valuable lesson she taught me: you don’t have to choose. Grab as many figs as you can carry.

In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” the main character describes her despair at choosing a future, using a fig tree as an extended metaphor.

“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America … I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose … unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Yes, a lost opportunity is a very real thing, but it isn’t the end-all-be-all. We don’t have to pick one thing to chase in life. And my grandmother taught me that — she marched into life standing 6 feet tall, and walked away with not one fig but a truckload. She took a million different paths in a little over 80 years.

I learned it a little late, but it still means just as much: we don’t have to look at our lives through one lens. We have a million opportunities shining at us, light refracting, like the ethereal glow we see through a kaleidoscope. To pass them by under the illusion that we can only have one — it’s the same as choosing to focus on just one color.

She knew as well as anyone: as time goes by, our lives only fracture into a million more rays of light, colors erupting. More materializes, and what started as two glass disks and an eyepiece becomes something much more elaborate. Life’s kaleidoscope becomes more complicated, sends more colors flashing your way as opportunities.

It’s up to us to take in all the colors that paint possibility.