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Full Stop Janet Kuypers 3/16/15 When you’re driving down the expressway, you see rush hour traffic slowing the lanes down, but you look up and the car in front of you is at a full stop, and a lot closer than you realized. So you slam on the brakes as hard as you can, you feel your car shuddering and screeching ‘til you feel your car rock back from the brakes once you’ve come to a full stop, just in time. In our short time here on planet Earth, we all understand the concept of a “full stop.” In the U.K., a full stop is another term for a period, to bring a sentence to a full stop... But in Star Trek, Captain Kirk, Jean Luc Picard, or even Commander Riker, have all been known to tell their crew to take the Enterprise to a “full stop.” But I have to ask: in relation to what? In relation to the stellar objects nearby? Because from what I’ve heard, the universe doesn’t sit still, but that everything’s expanding away from everything else. Are we at a full stop right now, on Earth, when the planet spins, and orbits the Sun, and our solar system is at the edge of an arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, spinning like mad. And think of it — our own galaxy is speeding away from everything else out there. So what is full stop, I’d have to ask. A full stop, in reference to what? Because without a reference point, we’re all just moving, faster than we can imagine. We’ll never stop. But I mean, it feels like we’re still, so I guess it’s all relative. If you’re in an unmoving line at a grocery store, or if you’ve turned off the engines of the Enterprise, you can at least say that suddenly, everything feels like a full stop.

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