Yes We Can

I want you to imagine a pair of sentences and then focus on what divides them. It is a tiny dot which has great power as it makes sense of all we read. I invite you to enlarge this dot into something that will bear your weight and that you can comfortably stand on. It has strength, doesn’t it? It must have, to keep sentences from colliding and to keep them beautifully and proportionally apart.

I too have stood on a full stop. I have walked its perimeter, looking at the story to its left and the clear passage to its right. The text preceding it was my life up to that very point, until I decided to call a halt and to write it in a different way. I bedded down on that solid circle for a whole month; I travelled, both physically and metaphorically. I had clambered onto the full stop’s surface burdened by responsibilities and by things which no longer served my life purpose. It was a hard climb to grasp that black elliptical rim and pull myself up into no man’s land, into a space between my old narrative and the potential new one. The cursor was poised.

Sometimes we do not have to clamber onto the full stop, heavy with exhaustion, but are hurled there through illness or through the death of someone close to us or a redundancy. We lie panting, healing, listening to our heartbeat whispering, “change, change”. And yes, we can change if we just rest awhile and give ourselves time to listen, time to gather our strength and our courage.

My full stop month witnessed me travelling solo round Britain, a menopausal woman in search for her heart’s desire. I was fond of my old life, it had made me who I was but I no longer wanted to read it. I wanted new sentences and a new vocabulary. So I slithered off the far side of the full stop and invited the cursor to keep pace.