When I was a child, the machine that produced bubbles - those perfectly round, rainbow-coloured, miraculous products of soap and water - fascinated me. With each blow, a bubble came out predictably similar shaped and coloured and yet unique in its route and final destination. Some flew just a few centimetres until colliding with another bubble or object, resulting in an unspectacular explosion. Others flew up and up in the air, hurting my eyes as I desperately tried to stare up at the sunny sky to follow their trajectory and witness how long such a temporary creation as bubble can last.
When we grow up, we stop blowing bubbles. Years later, as we pass by vendors of gadgets blowing bubbles in the air and children happily running after them, we nostalgically remember those moments when a bubble could bring moments of such intense happiness. Twenty, thirty, forty years later, it takes much more than a soap bubble to bring that warm tangling feeling to our hearts. Or does it? When do we stop blowing and following bubbles, secretly hoping that ours will fly the furthest and somehow, miraculously disappear in the oblivion without exploding?
Probably never. As we grow up and old, the metaphysics of the bubble changes but never the desire that our bubble be different than all the others, that it flies the farthest, somehow outpacing all the others as they struggle against the wind and all those random curveballs that life throws in our way. With time, instead of observing the bubble race from the outside, as independent observers thrilled at the moment of happiness afforded by a combination of soap and water, we create bubbles that define the perimeter of our happiness, the circle of our comfort zone.
And with that almost imperceptible transition, we risk becoming prisoners of our bubble, voluntarily surrendering our freedom to observe the bubble race carelessly from the outside. As we pack more luggage in our own bubble - memories, hurt, love, hatred and desires - our bubbles become heavier and less competitive with others, but being sealed inside, we no longer see that. Instead, we define our bubble by our religious identity, our social class, our professional route and just like this, the possibility of our bubble to intersect with other bubbles grows narrower.
And as as our bubble become an instrument of exclusion, we lose sight of the vast space where we are flying. What we believe is that instead we stand to gain identity, roots, habits, and a place we call home: a place where we might or might not live, but one to which we are always happy to come back to, almost as happy as we were as children blowing that perfect bubble in the clear sky. But what is home? In English, the word home is any place to which one comes back to at night: it could be a motel, a seven star hotel or a tent - anything but an open space which would automatically connate homelessness.
This distinction between home and homelessness is not trivial because the latter is not a sign of an unbearable lightless of being - of a bubble gone wildly out of control - but a sign of failure, of an inherent inability to fit into the social fabric, or at the very least of a terrible streak of misfortune, leading to the absence of home, to the absence of a bubble that we can inhabit. Homelessness - whether forced or self-imposed - is the absence of a bubble and while it may liberate us to see things we could not see otherwise, it comes at a price too high for most.
The late Lebanese American journalist Anthony Shadid wrote that in Arabic the word bayt - literally translated as house - connotes more than a physical home. Bayt is a sense of belonging to a place, a metaphysical connection that is beyond the walls of a place to which we return on a daily basis. Perhaps bayt is a better equivalent of our childhood bubble than home, a weightless sphere where we inhabit our own version of a fairy tale with perhaps no universally happy end, but one that makes us want to smile as we look into the vast sky.
Bayt is not necessarily inconsistent with homelessness, at least in the English language sense of it. To me, bayt is more about that place where we think we belong, despite everything that we know and believe about ourselves, despite all that might be factual and therefore logical. And it is a journey to this place that makes for a life, for a light bubble that floats and that we control ever so lightly and whose trajectory depends on other bubbles with which it collides or does not collide, as a result of the direction of the wind of fate.
