Do We Need More Bubbles?

Perhaps what we need more of isn’t happiness. Perhaps it is simply effervescence.

Our world can be a complicated place, filled simultaneously with joy and frustration, optimism and fear, beauty and pain. Some moments are ours to choose. Others arrive uninvited, with a kind of random precision. A phone call. A goodbye. A door unexpectedly opening. Someone falling in love with us. Someone leaving. A morning when everything seems possible. An afternoon when nothing goes well. 

We navigate these currents as best we can, sometimes confidently, sometimes simply trying to find our way through the Sargasso Sea and twisted woods of our own lives. And yet, amid all this complexity, there are remarkably simple things capable of lifting the human spirit.

One of them is a bubble.

Think about that for a moment. A transparent sphere filled with nothing more than air can make a child run across a lawn with both hands extended toward the sky. 

We blow bubbles as children and chase after them, delighted by something we know will disappear. We lower ourselves into a warm bath and watch tiny bubbles collect against our skin. 

At concerts, festivals and summer fairs, bubbles suddenly float above the crowd, catching the sunlight, and grown adults who moments earlier were checking their phones find themselves reaching upward to pop one with a finger.

There is something wonderfully irrational about our affection for bubbles. They have almost no substance. They cannot be possessed. The moment we touch them, they disappear.

And perhaps that is precisely their lesson.

Joy Does Not Always Need a Reason

We spend enormous portions of our lives pursuing things with weight: achievements, possessions, titles, money, recognition, security, certainty, purpose! We build schedules and plans. We measure progress. We accumulate evidence that our lives are moving in the right direction.

Effervescence asks something different of us.

It asks us to notice what is light. A laugh from the next room. Sunlight dancing on water. The smell of bread coming from an oven. Music heard through an open window. The electricity of walking into a room and unexpectedly seeing someone you love. The cosmic colors and crinkle of Autumn leaves against an impossibly blue sky.

The first warm evening of spring when everyone seems to have arrived at the same realization: winter is finally over. 

These moments rarely announce themselves as important. They don't arrive with certificates.

They cannot be deposited into an account. They simply rise, and then they disappear. Like bubbles.

Perhaps that is why effervescence is such an interesting word. We usually use it to describe something fizzy or sparkling, but its emotional meaning is much richer. To be effervescent is to be animated, buoyant, vivacious, alive. It is not quite the same thing as happiness. Happiness can be quiet and deeply internal. Effervescence has movement to it. It rises. It tingles. It wants to escape its boundaries.

Effervescence is happiness with kinetic energy.

We Can Feel It in Our Bodies

You know the sensation. Something wonderful is about to happen and you feel it before it happens. Your posture changes. Your eyes brighten. Your attention becomes sharper. Perhaps there is even a slight tingling beneath your skin.

It can happen when the lights dim before a performance, when someone says, “I have a surprise for you,” or when the plane begins its descent toward a city you've dreamed of visiting. It happens when friends you haven't seen for years walk through the door, or when everyone at the table begins laughing at exactly the same moment. For a few seconds, we become lighter.

And sometimes that lightness moves between us.

When Effervescence Becomes Collective

More than a century ago, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim gave a remarkable name to this phenomenon: collective effervescence. He was fascinated by what happens when human beings gather and experience something together. People sing, dance, celebrate, cheer and participate in rituals, and somehow the emotional energy generated by the group becomes greater than the emotions of the individuals within it.

Anyone who has stood in a stadium when thousands of people rise in synch for the wave understands this. So does anyone who has danced deliriously in a crowd at a concert for Taylor or James or Dido or Olivia or whomever has electric meaning for you. 

Have you sat around a dinner table when conversation crosses that mysterious threshold between pleasant and magical, or attended a wedding when two people turn toward their friends and family after saying yes to one another and the room erupts?

For an instant, the boundaries between me and us become porous. Joy becomes contagious.

That is collective effervescence.

And I find something beautiful in the fact that Durkheim chose that particular word. Because effervescence behaves the same way in a glass.

It rises.

The Metaphysics of a Bubble

Watch a glass of sparkling wine closely sometime. Not simply as something to drink. Watch it.

A tiny bubble forms against the glass. At first, it is almost invisible. Then another molecule joins it, and another. The bubble grows until eventually it releases itself and begins its journey upward.

Others follow, hundreds of tiny spheres rising toward the surface, carrying aroma with them, gathering briefly in a delicate mousse before disappearing into the air.

There is something almost metaphysical about it. The wine seems alive.

Perhaps this is one reason sparkling wine has accompanied human celebration for centuries. We open it at weddings, births, victories, anniversaries, promotions and reunions. The bubbles become punctuation:

Something has happened. Pay attention. This moment matters.

But I have become increasingly interested in another possibility.

What if we don't need to wait for something important to happen?

Creating Our Own Effervescence

We tend to treat joy as though it were a reward. Finish the work. Reach the milestone. Get the promotion. Survive the week. Then celebrate.

But what if effervescence could work in the opposite direction? What if small acts of delight could generate some of the energy that helps us move through the rest of life?

Put on the music. Open the windows. Light the candle on an ordinary Tuesday. Call the friend. Wear the ridiculous hat. Dance in the kitchen. Open the bottle you've been saving. Take the beautiful glasses out of the cabinet. Invite someone over without requiring an occasion. Notice the sunlight. Chase the bubble.

These actions do not erase grief, fear, loneliness or uncertainty. Effervescence should never become an instruction to pretend that difficult things aren't difficult. It is something gentler. It is the decision to leave small openings through which delight can enter.

The Courage to Be Light

Perhaps there is even courage in effervescence.

Our culture frequently associates seriousness with importance. We admire gravity. We speak of “weighty” matters and “substantial” ideas. Lightness can seem frivolous.

But a bubble suggests otherwise. It is delicate without being meaningless. Temporary without being unimportant. Beautiful precisely because it cannot last.

There may be wisdom in that. We cannot hold onto every dinner, every friendship, every summer evening, every bottle, every kiss, every song or every person we love forever. The bubble rises. We see it. For one luminous instant, it catches the light. And then it is gone.

Our responsibility may not be to make the bubble permanent.

It may simply be to notice it while it is here.

In Search of Effervescence

This is what the word has come to mean to me.

EFFERVESCENCE began with my fascination with sparkling wine, but somewhere along the way the word escaped the bottle. I began seeing effervescence everywhere: in people, music, conversation, travel, friendship and creativity. In those rare dinners when nobody wants to leave the table. And in the quieter moments when we deliberately create a little beauty just for ourselves.

Sparkling wine remains a wonderful metaphor for all of this because it makes the invisible visible. Energy rises. Aroma rises. Bubbles rise. Our attention rises with them.

Perhaps we can do the same.

We cannot choose everything that happens to us. We cannot eliminate the complicated mixture of beauty and pain that accompanies being human. But perhaps we can become more attentive to the things that lift us. And perhaps, occasionally, we can create them.

A song, a gathering, a beautiful glass, a ridiculous laugh, a conversation that goes on longer than expected, a bubble drifting through the afternoon sunlight. Small things. Fleeting things. Effervescent things.

And when one appears, perhaps the wisest thing we can do is reach toward it. Not because we expect to hold it forever, but because, for one shimmering moment, we were here to see it rise.

So, what do you think. Do we need more bubbles?

And, if so, how might you create and share your effervescence?