I was going to carry on with part three (photo) and part four (name) of my one month review, and something has made me hesitate.  Is this too much reviewing?  I ask myself.  I feel a bit ‘I’ve started so I’ve finished’, but I don’t want to pay so much attention to something that I wear it out, like washing.

So in fact I will leave it there for reviewing for now.

Leaving some things unsaid is perhaps surprisingly like the dynamic of deciding when to jump off a wave you’re surfing.   Once you’re up, it’s so tempting to ride that wave all the way to the very end, to get the last centimetre of wave out of the experience.  But sometimes that leaves you on a scrappy bit of wave with no energy left in it, plus you’ve gone so far the paddle back can be really long.  Sometimes it’s better just to hop off earlier, leaving some energy and excitement ready for the next one.

In the writing I’ve been doing so far, knowing when to hop off what I’m writing has proven surprisingly challenging.  One of the most common final things before I post a post is to delete the last line.  (I’ll be heading over to ‘found poem, London, autumn 2014’ soon to get rid of ‘Go to it’, I can feel it’s too heavy-handed).  I have an aversion to overemphasising a point and making it annoying.  The other day I realised I wanted to coin a new word, something like obviaphobia, to label the fear I have of saying something that is too obvious, or that has been said too many times already, or getting wedged in an cliché.

(Leaving things unsaid is a habit I try to cultivate in friendships and work.  My sense of justice and precision is such that I often feel compelled to aim for accuracy in accounts of events, feelings, responsibility.  But this kind of precision can be too much to bear.  Discretion is an unsung hero of human relations.)

In music, I have been learning about ‘interrupted cadences’.  A cadence is two chords in a row.  The ones I have been learning about are at the end of a phrase of music.  A perfect cadence sounds like an ending.  And imperfect cadence sounds like you’ve just taken a breath but are about to end.  And then the interrupted cadence is my favourite.  It’s like leading someone up to the end of a path, and stopping just as the path turns a corner, and you can’t see what’s next.

The what’s next? is the unsaid bit, and I like the bit fact that leaving a bit unsaid leaves a space for the reader.