01. Bubbles

When I was a little girl, I was completely fascinated with bubbles. Once upon time at my old house when the backyard ground was not marred by a pool, my mother used to take my brother and I outside, and we would blow bubbles, watching them float into the horizons. When a pool settled into our earth several years later, I would lay comfortably back in a buoyant chair, letting the cool, cerulean water cascade over my legs and watching my own blown bubbles soar upwards towards the sky.

Bubbles are captivating.

There are liquid bubbles, and there are air bubbles. While a liquid bubble is merely gas in liquid such as the materialized carbon dioxide in soft drinks or sea foam, air bubbles have an aesthetic quality to them.

Most people run around popping bubbles and giggling in delight seeing a large one explode before their eyes. When my brother used to enjoy destroying them with his fingers, I relished the extraneous process of catching them. My goal always when I see a bubble is to see whether I can balance it on my finger and how long I can keep the bubble in existence around me. I always became rather upset as a child when my bubble burst.

I still am charmed about bubbles to this day. Every time I wash dishes or walk around a park and I see a random bubble floating through, it makes me smile.

They have the ability to reflect a multitude of colors, and upon looking through them, I see a distorted, frothy version of the world. They reflect images. They merge. They sail tranquilly minding no one’s business and move heavenwards. They are created by simple water and soap, and the soap does its duty by stabilizing them. They leave pink, yellow, and green plastic blowers as contorted shapes but submerge as a perfect sphere.

They are childhood innocence.

Bubbles remind me of humans. We are shaped by our environment and other people, and then we are let free to fend for ourselves in this harsh world where people are always going to poke you and break you apart. But everyone has a protective shell; some may be more fragile than others. We merge together to stay strong. We all float around, trying to figure out what life is and why God has placed us on this Earth.

We question. We float. We constantly think.

We are all different colors, and we all reflect different histories.

But like bubbles, we ascend as a human and as humankind.

As we grow in our education and morals, we become wiser. We learn what’s important, and hopefully we start to treasure what precious life we have. To understand happiness does not mean being in a bubble of blithe, it means we understand what is given to us and we promise to expand our understanding in order to reach peace within.

What about the kid to the right of you in class who always jokes around and gets in trouble? We scoff and we say, ‘He can’t possibly become wiser. If anything, he’s getting dumber.’

But we all are. Everything that happens to us ascends us higher; it’s just whether the human learns to embrace it. The knowledge is always accumulating inside of us. We just have to learn to tap into it.

The custodian. The trashcan man.

We are all bubbles trying to reach the top. Trying to be the best we can be. The circumstances and the opportunities [the wind embracing the bubbles] are what makes all of us different.

It’s why I choose to always catch bubbles, blinking and staring into them, trying to see what colors and images I can see while all the while determined to make the bubble last as long as it could. I try to support people and to help people as much as I can. I love learning about people’s pasts. It’s what we must do if we desire any illusion of world peace. Like a friend of mine said, learning others’ personal histories makes them feel appreciated, like they actually count in this often lonely world! We are changed by what others have to say. But sometimes we run too fast to care.

Maybe I’m an over-analyzer. I think too much. I’m definitely not trying to preach to humanity. These are my thoughts. These are my outlooks on how I view things. I’m never completely right. Like I said earlier, my goal of this blog is to sort out my thoughts, refine them, and hopefully touch one person or so. Take it or leave it.

So bubbles. What are you going to do next time one floats by?

Cherish.

Current Song: City On Our Knees by tobymac

I own none of the photography.