FEBRUARY 21, MONDAY

BLOWING BUBBLES

I started these daily posts as a way of describing the events of each day as I traveled through Greece and Germany. But I found I liked wondering about my passage through daily life in Greece and Germany so continued to write posts when I returned to Swannanoa. But here with Omicron all around I rarely got out of the house. And I discovered that my passage through life was not a movement through the outer world so much as a movement through my inner world. And I soon found myself in as strange a place as any foreign land could be. I have the feeling that the deeper I get into wondering about myself the more confused I get and the less likely I am to make sense to anyone except myself, and then barely. I‘ve tried this post three times, writing instead about my room in Paris, because I sounded, even to myself, almost unintelligible. So I give up. Here is is, with no pretence of making sense to anyone else. You can read it with curiosity or skip it without missing a thing. Be forewarned, however, I‘ll probably keep on trying to figure this out.

I have a question that I can‘t resolve. I am not even sure that I can even ask the question. It starts like this. We live in a universe that is so huge with so many billions of galaxies each with billions of stars that I can‘t get my head around it. It doesn‘t even matter if I get the numbers right, the size of the universe is beyond comprehension. The same is true of time. For billions and billions of years the universe which started out the size of a head of a pin has been exapanding and evolving, slowly shifting over eons of time in a chance, random fashion. Way off in one corner of the universe is a small planet, Earth, where life began and has evolved. But even this evolution of life on earth which started relatively late in the timespan of the universe has taken from a human perspective an enormous time. The time that it took for life to slowly evolve into plants and animals of all sorts has taken forever and ever and ever as species came and went of all shapes and sizes. And then at the very end, just a blip in time, humans appeared. But even in human history your life and mine is shorter than the flicker of light.

So the question is, what is the significance of my life, a blink of an eye in the vastness of space and time. From this perspective my life and yours has no significance at all.

And yet I live my life and you live yours as if every moment is significant. And not only is it significant, but among the billions of people on earth today, my life to me is the most significant.

How can I live so briefly off in one corner of this universe, immense in time and immense in space, a universe of chance evolution, and feel so important?

The only answer that I can come up with is that in this long evolution of life, I and every other form of life is impelled along by something in our DNA which makes our own passage seem overwhelmingly important, and by extension makes the lives of other humans important. Even though I think of myself as being most significant, logic tells me that every other human must feel equally significant, and be equally significant.

So the real question is how can this be? And it is here that I get most confused. The best that I can come up with is the feeling that I live in a bubble of my own projection. Something within me, many roiling emotional drives, not only impell me along but assure me that I am important. In the vastness of the universe in which I am lost, what really is significant to me is the bubble in which I live. This bubble is fueled by inner mythical drives and is even bounded by my projections. Everything that is significant is significant because it touches me in some inner visceral way, because it makes me feel more alive or it threatens me. In the process I color the world around me and transform it. There seems to be a direct metaphorical connection between my inner response and the world that I live in. A face or a sunset or a violin playing Bach touches something deep within me and makes me feel alive. Or put the other way something inside me makes a certain face seem most alive, gives the colors of the sunset resonance, gives the notes of the Violin intensity. The center of the bubble that I create and live within is the visceral mythical forces within me, beyond my consciousness, the the inner wall of the bubble through which I see everything that is outside me is colored, like a stained glass window, by my response to it. I transform the objective world through my emotional response. I live within my bubble and this is where I find meaning, it is not only a human bubble but it is my personal bubble. And within this bubble everything is very alive including the world around me seen through the lens of my bubble. And this is how I am so certain that my life is significant. I feel it every day. And when people reveal their bubble to me by their response to the world around them they can also make me feel alive and together we inherit and recreate a huge bubble of our shared culture which enhances the the values of the culture through being shared by so many people. The more people who value what I value, respond as I respond, the more intense and alive the values are.

Except, as a human I can also stand objectively outside my bubble and see myself as others see me. My bubble from the outside is the shape of my body and actually seems pretty ordinary, as other people do to me. And I can see that all cultures are relative to each other and that all of our bubbles, as intense as they may seem when we are within them are just bubbles and that in the vastness of the universe they are, we are, simply evolved human ways of responding, no more significant than are the bubbles of dogs or cows, the bubble each living creature exists in, a result of inner life force and projected intensity.

We have to be objective and clear eyed about the way the world in a Sancho Panza way, knowing what actually is or we will be like Don Quixote in our own bubble projected onto the world tilting at windmills. But to be fully alive and to be open to the life force. Within us and the way that it colors the world we have to let our Don Quixote selves go and imagine that what we do is extremely significant and that our mythical journey is supremely important.

In any case, the bubble we live in which is so rich with projected and imagined meanings that well up from within us or from people around us, will, one day, as colorful and alive as it is, go pop, in a spray of sparkling light and vanish as if it had never been here in the first place. Our internal universe will vanish, with only the endlessly expanding fathomless universe remaining.