Imagine a soap bubble.
What are its qualities?
Round?
Prismatic?
Translucent?
What about temporary?
Ephemeral.We know from the moment a soap bubble forms, its purpose is not to be everlasting. It is not destined for permanence.
It is destined to exist for its moment, then to burst.
We expect little of a soap bubble, if we notice it at all.
It may rise for a glorious moment on a warm updraft, rising aloft not through its own qualities but merely by the position it occupied upon its creation.
It may fall to the floor, lighter than a feather but not immune to the force of gravity inexorably pulling it down, bursting on a surface irrespective of its quality as a bubble.
Any thoughts, emotions, or narrative a person may prescribe to the bubble are irrelevant. It exists. Then it doesn’t.
C’est la vie.
So it goes.
We humans are not dissimilar to the bubble.
A person may rise in the flow of systems that did not choose them for any quality other than their starting position in relation to the system. A bubble born in an updraft.
A person may fall unabated, smashing onto rock bottom pulled down by forces so large as to feel like they part of the very fabric of reality.
A bubble may last seven or eight seconds.
A person? Seventy or eighty years.
Where we see a vast difference in the nature our existence, the universe sees one that lasts a moment, and another just a moment more. On the cosmic scale of time a bubble and a person are of no lasting relevance.
The time we have in this life is short. For the believers in cosmic cycles and reincarnation of the soul, even the aggregate time in the world is finite, and eventually just as small on the scale of infinity.
For believers in an eternal existence in a world after this one, we still only get one moment in the world easily lost in the span of the eternal life of the soul.
And for those who believe that our existence only includes the period from our first breath to our last, it is more precious still.
Time, all of it, is big. Really, really, really big. Big beyond the capacity of us to truly comprehend.
Within time we exist, we rise, we fall, we burst. A fleeting drop in a sea larger than human understanding.
In nearly all ways on this scale we are similar to a bubble.
In all ways but one. And it’s an important one.
Though limited by our brief time and inability to control our circumstances, we have agency. We can choose how we interact with those around us. And we feel the impacts of the choices of others.
Choose to harm others, to make intolerable the brief time shared? All will be eventually erased by erosion and entropy.
So too will choosing to help, to lift, to pull others into our warm updraft. None of it will be remembered, none will matter on this material plane.
Even in the worst moments, this too shall pass. And so too for the best.
What will you choose before you burst?
If you’re ready to explore practical philosophy for everyday ethical decisions, without the academic jargon, subscribe to Radical Kindness: Empathy as Rebellion. Every week, I share frameworks for navigating moral complexity, personal stories of growth through adversity, and tools for building a more ethical life.
Join a growing number of thoughtful readers who are figuring out how to be good humans in a complicated world.
So it goes 🫶 beautiful Anthony!