Invisible bubbles that we are living in
Who doesn't love blowing air into the ring of soap film, tightly pulled on all sides by the surface tension, until it turns into a sphere and takes off? We all have done it. I still remember those evening walks on the sidewalk at the beach, walking through hundreds of those tiny bubbles that flew towards me from the group of kids excited by exploiting this physics of our nature.
The film is less than a millimeter thick and transparent, only the refraction of light inside the bubble that split the white light into the colors made it detectable to our eye. A few seconds later and a few meters up, it pops.
The love for bubbles doesn't die even when you grow up. You still smile when you see one that spontaneously appears while washing your dishes. Automatically the child in you makes you want to touch or catch it before it pops.
The perfect sphere and subtle but distinct color make them look beautiful.
As I walk down the road past those bubbles, I can't help but realize the existence of another kind of bubble that doesn't pop itself. We all have it, you cannot feel it but you can see it eventually.
This is a bubble that engulfs a person almost for their entire lifetime. The irony is that we do not know that we are already inside a bubble for a long time. Only those who see it, seek to pop it.
These are our social, religious, philosophical, and political bubbles. We find comfort in them as they provide protection to us from the bubbles of others that we do not agree with. We tend to like people with similar bubbles. When we meet them, our bubbles merge and become one giant bubble with all of us inside it. The surface tension of these bubbles can grab people, just like water droplets grab ants that came to drink from them.
As the bubble collectively grows larger, there spawns an urge to pursue people from other bubbles to come into ours. But, not leaving ours to explore theirs. We find plenty of ways to increase the diameter of our bubbles. Sometimes with force, sometimes with love, and sometimes with – deception.
We try hard to justify and convince others to stay within our giant bubble, or maybe I should say – our self-imagined reality? We feel vulnerable to come out of this invisible bubble as if we feel naked outside it.
When people are disconnected from others' views, the bubbles grow. When people accept others' views, the bubbles shrink. Sometime in the far future, there will be a saturation point where everyone can share their views with others resulting in realizations and ultimately popping the bubbles.
You may not be able to pop the giant bubble with people in it, but at least you can pop yours by gathering courage and with the sharpness of your intellect. Only then, you can observe all the floating bubbles, just like when you walk at the beach next to those kids.