142. ...inconsolable, unicorns.
(morning thinking)
Am I prepared for my bubble to burst?
At the end of last week The Daily Stoic Journal asked, “Am I prepared for my bubble to burst?” and the question has since rolled rhythmically into my thoughts and back out again with the surety of tides.
In the past bubbles came, almost exclusively, in bright little plastic bottles with a wee stringless tennis racket scaled down for a mouse. We’d grip the handle and dip the hoop end into the bottle, slosh it about to trap magical pearlescent liquid, gently withdraw, hold the racket to our lips and blow our own gentle breath through tightly stretched iridescent film. Trapped liquid rainbows. With skill and luck finely balanced we would tease a solitary bubble from the hoop to float magical on the breeze. We’d watch it, watch it, watch it, focus. We’d squint to hold it in our vision til the very last moment of it’s ephemeral journey.
These days bubbles spew and cascade into the air, puffed out by a spinning electric fan fed by a reservoir of Bubble Mixture. There are bubble wands and bubble ropes and bubble kits and bubble experts everywhere.
I think I preferred when bubbles happened one at a time. Is this proliferating cascade progress? I’m sure it’s not a bad thing. Just different.
Bubble machines raise wonder in toddlers and adults alike. Adults hide their glee, it’s just bubbles after all. An ephemeral skin of soapy liquid stretched taught around trapped air - slow spinning spheres of unicorn tears. Sobbing, inconsolable, unicorns. Bubble after bubble after bubble.
Nothing special.
My mind feels like a bubble machine.
Idea after idea, bubble after bubble - form, float, pop. So many bubbles and if I wasn’t prepared for them to burst, if I wasn’t ready, from their first moment of inception, to accept that they may very well flounder, burst and fail, I’d live in a constant state of disappointment.
Better to enjoy the little bubbles as they go.
It is in the nature of a bubble to burst, yet we talk about burst bubbles with undertones of shame and shock. “I’m just waiting for the bubble to burst”. It would be foolish to act as though one might keep a bubble forever or to imagine a bubble that might grow without ever popping.
Silly to expect figs from a peach tree.
In last year’s journal I read that last year’s rain lashed aggressively on my last year's morning window and last year’s thunder crashed through the clouds. Summer always ends. Winter always comes, even Indian Summer bubbles burst.
Summer forgot to end this year. September days as hot as June’s high heatwave. I feel my usual end of summer sadness stirring. Impending SAD. The incongruous sunshine holds it back a little but the glum is there. I can see in last year’s journal entries that though the weather is different my thoughts and feelings are similar. Cyclical thinking.
This practice of journaling is helpful in so many ways. Using last year’s journal to spark reflection on the present highlights the way many of my thoughts and experiences are seasonal, cyclical, repeated, familiar. At least within this limited dataset.
Bubbles that swell and burst, swell and burst.
The cat and I transpose last year’s pencil words into typed bytes of data. Last year’s reflections echo into this year to inform this year’s thinking. I’m curious about feedback, creating a loop. Is this practice foolish? Now that the inevitable end of this year is visible in the not to distant future I begin to wonder whether I’ll keep the document going. Add a further year’s reflection. Is that healthy? Is there still value in this? Or does it just become a habit. A crutch for lazy thinking.
I wonder the same about this Substack. I started writing here in October 2022 and as October 2023 hoves, heaves, into view I wonder whether it’s something I’ll continue to do. Maybe a year of this writing is enough. Maybe it gets the heave ho.
In the beginning I wrote fast. I always had something I needed to write and posted two or three times a week. It was a way to capture fleeting thoughts. Trap bubbles.
I don’t feel that urgency so much now.
Covid seems to have made thinking a bit harder. Thoughts don’t move so quickly. I feel less coherent. Or maybe that’s just the heat of summer.
I think I probably will take a break from Substack in October. Maybe I’ll start at the first post and take time to read back over the whole body of work.
I’d be interested in your thoughts. What’s this all been for?
Some of you have been subscribed since the start and commenting, messaging, emailing your responses and contributions to whatever thinking there’s been. I am very, very grateful.
Thanks for reading. I love that we have this.
Paul.
Haha! Burst bubbles from a tiny wee old school plastic bubble pot. I love this 🥰
To write or not to write? (on substack at least) it would be our loss if you stopped Paul.
I know what you mean about the slowing down of thoughts and musings. I am the same, at first I had to hold myself back not wanting to over Steve the audience but now I'm down to once a month.
I've been guilty in the past of being really enthusiastic at the start only for things to fade. But I think I've just got a lot on and I'm writing in other areas too, so maybe that's enough.
Hope you are well my friend, time to rest and restore, as autumn brings that change.