Outer Space
As we go through life we create what our friend and colleague, Jack Condon, calls “A sense of place”.
I like to imagine myself creating my sense of place inside a “bubble of being”. Sometimes the reality I “imagine” is a physical place, but often it’s a psychological state of being.
At times our “bubbles of being” are shattered for a multitude of reasons: changes in age, work, relationship, parenting, loss, or even all of those.
During those times of change, we are “outside the bubble”. We’re free floating and it’s scary and unsettling not to be within a bubble of predictability.
However, there’s also a lot of freedom in that outer space to create the next “bubble of being”.
As I move toward retirement, one of my “bubbles of being” is about to pop and I haven’t imagined another one yet.
My past “bubbles” are floating around me. Some stuff repeats in each bubble from my earliest sense of being (siblings, for example, and messages from parents). But there’s always something new. And I think the bubbles keep getting more crowded… haha. Maybe in the end we discover that after we pop the last bubble, we all end up in the same big bubble.