Cessation

When is it enough and when is it not quite there? A moment later, a fraction more and it would be too much. But there's a very finely tuned sensor that monitors the colouration of the coffee; the muscle contractions and releases in the chest, upper arm, forearm and hand and the discrete multiple ripple of flexion /release that allows the fingers to dynamically clasp and unclasp the plastic half litre of milk as a continuous slow pour in this wave-like action of ebb and flow. But there comes a time; an instant in the activation of space as movement, where the thin stream of milk funnelling in one continuous arch from the bottle into the cup below, must cease.

What is this slow ceasing that is in preparation at every connective instant where the action still occurs. Put like that it is not really apt to call it an interruption. Because it is written into the act from the very beginning, monitoring and containing the stream so that its halt is a foregone conclusion. We foresee this stoppage even in the full flow of an activity. This pact between expansion or doing and containment and the cessation of doing is far more nuanced then it is often portrayed in words where action and halt cut a dry line between two polar opposites that seem to sit alongside one another as clear demarcations without ever touching or really having anything to do with one another.

I think the action and cessation are rinsed through and through like breath particles in the air that may manifest as liquid where the right conditions of joint volition and the potential for cessation are there. This is more like a clasp around which the patterned thought that takes shape around our physical and practically induced pacing arrives and departs simultaneously.

There is something to enquire about in this simplest of acts of judging how we like our coffee or tea and making it so. How anxiety-inducing this would be if we worked off a colour chart similar to the ones we find in a household paint shop to match what we remember to be the hue on our bedroom wall with these strips of tonality that jostle at minute gradations next to one another. It would be near impossible to work off such a stored bench-mark of desired tone. No it is in the very act of the pouring when muscle groups and breath in the lived body are symphonic patternings around minute thresholds of eye-hand-muscle coordination that the cessation locks in as if it had a life of its own. So then what is this lived body that is deciding the details of our coffee preference and somehow reaching the soft spot like in a good game of tennis where the ball effortlessly reflects back off the players' bat and the shot plays itself simply because all the details of court, player, hand, racket and ball are momentarily aligned to make use of  this one optimum contact.

We do not usually think of the cessation of an action as this kind of sweet sensation but maybe there is a deep pleasure; a kind of sensory- neurological stroking into a feeling of rightness that this cessation brings, just as  the racket held in the optimum position then comes to rest and simply waits for the ball to impact and bounce out again. In that sense then the action is automatic without any particular agency. It is simply the staying put in the details of a multiple and dynamic field pf action; the working through duration into a deeper and more disparate sense of pattern-making. Action only really has an impact- is felt and known to itself- when in these cessations or pause-gaps it is allowed to linger as if in total suspension; between here and there, this and that. These intervals are like breathing buffer zones that give nuance and articulation to movement and are as much a part of movement as the manifest exhibition or end result they bring forth.
They are the timing; the commas and semi-colons that mark out a new intake of breath in the explication of  a phrase in a story, a news bulletin, a personal narrative.

There is always a great deal of skill in these pause-gaps but they do not; cannot know themselves in the immediacy of their occurrence or even when they are reformulated over and over again. Because they are dissipated through and through within the action that when read back simply omits to see the gaps as anything but glitches or interruptions in a near continuous flow.

Without containment there can be no movement. But this containment like a good mother must be invisible to the action outside of its simple practical executive functioning of bringing forth or pacing what are perceived to be end-results.But the real value is in the pacing as it takes place in its details and particularities and in the fine-tuning of human-environment in to a co-emergance that has a particular resonance or flavour unmissable but unrepeatable. If the containment or cessation started to be a thing in itself or even to take on a kind of personhood with agency and decision making powers of its own it would sabotage the action and the automatic settlement in the sweet spot of the game out of which un-foretold stories might effortlessly emerge.
The cup of coffee speaks back to the coffee maker but it is a sign, a symbol of multiple actions that could never be reduced to that cup of coffee alone let alone to the bench-mark preferences of that drinker who may state as a gross overstatement to a third party; "I Like it milky" or "I like it strong". Yet it is in the continual monitoring and resetting of the threshold between too much and too little that the power of cessation; the embracing quality of a breathable containment comes through allowing foreground to shimmer on the waves of a darkened background and allowing this interplay between stillness and movement to coordinate and co-define one another as an integrated action: a literacy that evolves its own grammar in the moment of its making- never as a thing set apart.