We the Bubble People

While Eveline has her Elmer stories, let me tell you about my adventures with the Bubble People. However, my creativity only allows me to narrate my story, and any attempt at picture-drawing like Eveline’s Elmer stories has proven futile for me, so I shall not even try to show any illustrations in my bubble people story.

I would consider myself to be once a bubble person. I think it’s hard to not be one when one is born in an island that is surrounded by one big gigantic bubble.

But unlike the rest of the inhabitants of the island, my bubble has since burst and once your bubble is burst, you can never go back to living your life as if you are still a bubble person.

This is a conversation that happened not so long ago when I told my bubble friends that I chose to go to Nepal over an internship at SPH or even a chance to work for Reuters:

Bubble person 1 just widened her eyes at me when I told her just that.

X (aka moi): “You know, why don’t you want to try something different, do something that you are really passionate about and then your career will follow soon enough?”

Bubble person 1: “Oh, please lah, nowadays most of us have to be practical, it’s all about networking and then getting the best-paid job in our oh-so-realistic and competitive society. And besides, our bubble island is so safe and prosperous so why should I do anything different?”

Bubble person 2: “Yeah I used to think like you, X, but ever since I came to uni I started to become more practical. I figured that is the reality and the only way to survive.”

Bubble person 1: “And I think that you are too idealistic and think too abstract so that’s why we’ll never agree.”

So the conversation ends here. The bubble people continue to think that they have decided for themselves the best way to succeed in life and hence are unable to be open-minded about so many experiences in this world.

But I agree to disagree with the bubble people. Well, that’s how the bubble people view the world. Nothing wrong with that. But why should they think that I’m too idealistic and “abstract”? If you have read Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, you would know that I sometimes feel that I am holding onto the top of the rabbits fur and having a much wider view of the world, while those below are stuck inside the fur and the amusing thing is to them that’s all the world that they live in and that they keep trying to urge X’s like me who are on top to come down quickly to “the real world”. I may be completely wrong in my own choices, but at least I chose to go which way I want to walk without any regrets. How many bubble people can say that?

So what is reality then? To the bubble people, it is a concrete thing. To X’s like me, it is fluid, and one is in control of one’s own reality. And again, if you get to the end of Sophie’s World, you’ll understand that reality is seldom a constant. So who are we to judge whose opinions are better than others? And who are we to judge whose questions are stupid and totally a waste of our time? Often, the simplest questions may yield the most complex answers, if one just bother to stop, listen and ponder about it for awhile.

And so I went to talk to another X, who thinks of the bubble island as a place where she grew up but not where she now calls home (her home is in another faraway place where bubbles will turn to ice when it’s created so they don’t really have bubbles there).

So her opinion was that the bubble island does not have room for artists, visionaries and dreamers, because these people kept trying to poke holes into the already fragile bubble island. But I don’t consider myself as any of these three groups of people. I just want to understand the world that I live in, in my own time and own way. But I guess the people who make the bubbles on the island are too busy to allow me my own time and space to explore.

And she reminded me that I was not the only one of the X’s who is trying to live peacefully in the bubble island without a bubble. Back in JC, we had a GP teacher who always reminded us that while we might think we know a lot about the world, in actual fact we only know a small microcosm of the environment that we are born and grew up in. As Mrs X puts it so succinctly, we are just “in little (bubble island), in little Bukit Tiimah, in little HCJC”. Something that all the inhabitants of bubble island should always keep in mind.

There are many X’s in our own little bubble island. While we might no longer live in bubbles like the bubble people, most of the time it’s due to our own choice. As X’s, we are able to understand what it was like to live in a bubble once, but the bubble people, having lived in bubbles all their lives, often do not get how it is like to be an X. So that’s the challenge that X’s face if they choose to continue living on bubble island.

And honestly, I still do not know if I am strong enough to face these challenges.


The End
(Well, this series of We the Bubble People will continue whenever I have new inspiration and more importantly, time, for it. Because living on the bubble island somehow makes your time shorter.)