Day 88: When I’m blowing bubbles…
Do you have to be in the right mood to play, or does it have a power to draw you in? I wasn’t especially pumped to play when I took my bottle of bubble mix into the garden because – yes – I’d committed to playing for 100 days in a row. I winced and swore as I spilled it when opening the lid, covering my hand with slippery slime, and had to wash it off under the freezing outdoor tap.
And then I started blowing bubbles. And almost instantly the fug vanished and I found myself in a place of delight. I tried really hard to blow just a single bubble, and then made a stream of twenty or thirty appear in just one breath. Some flew straight down to the ground, some rose into the air, some hung there, like hummingbirds hovering.

I tried to pay attention, as I have been doing through the whole challenge and was inspired and excited by the way the bubbles burst when they hit the ground. It hasn’t occurred to me before that you don’t see them burst. I’m not imagining a bubble-gum bubble splattering, but you don’t even see a split-second of explosion. They are just there one moment and gone forever the next. It’s like someone has clicked on a clip-art image that’s on the screen and tapped ‘delete’, and there’s no evidence they ever existed.
And then there are some that manage to land. I feel joy when one of the little blighters bounces on a leaf, before settling on the paving slab. It’s the opposite sort of physicality to the easily-burst, there one-second-not-the-next disappearances I’ve been observing. This bubble has bounced, because it happened to find a soft landing, and that slowing-down has allowed it to find a place to rest on the hard floor that has destroyed the others.
And my bad mood is swept away.

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher – William Osler
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