Timing is all, Sarah thought: it was the art of knowing when to persevere with something, and when to run away. It was easy with material things: you would know in a trice whether a frock fitted you or whether a pair of shoes pinched your toes. In maters of taste it was a little more tricky: you might change your mind about a puce wall, and give it up in favour of magenta, or you might decide that the fey Botticelli was more to your taste than Rubens, and abandon his rolling fleshpots. Ideas were easy too. It was simply a matter of deciding which one were still worth their keep. Sarah’s heap of abandoned concepts was high: false consciousness, the determinant in the last instance, the mirror-phase, the speaking absence. She had given them up because they no longer fitted the bill, or hers anyway. It was a matter of use-value. The value of some concepts could be intermittent or, more usually, there was a steady decline in their usefulness. Sarah could not float free from the world of ideas (that was, after all, the best flirtation!), but she had to recognise that it, like everything else, was subject to the law of context and change. Because ideas were not immutable, you could abandon them without a qualm.

But what was really tricky was knowing when to give up on relationships or feelings. It was, of course, clear when they  no longer worked: that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, when you had offered yourself to the person least desirous of the gift (or indeed least able to take advantage of it). Or the deadening hush which descended when  you realised you had told a fart joke to someone chronically afflicted with flatus, and that you had offended them profoundly. Such moments were best forgotten, and one should  abandon those connections, since recovery or resistance was futile. Sarah came to see that it was a question of roles. She had made a habit of trying to force people into roles for which they were not suited: she had wanted some people to be lovers when they would have been far happier being her friend. Or, she had wanted someone to be her pet when they were better suited to being her uncle. Or, she had underestimated her own mothering proclivities, when she would have done better to admit to them and start to knit mufflers rather then dispense writing advice. To avoid the traumas of giving up, Sarah needed to develop (in herself and others) the skill of being flexible: of slipping between roles without anyone noticing. She had long espoused the concept of the silent divorce: that practice of maintaining your own equanimity without giving pain. Now perhaps it was time to hoist into service the idea of the silent slippage: from poodle to Alsatian, from confidante to grande odalisque, from mentor to pupil, from agony aunt to Bodhisattava. That flexibility had more mileage than sticking with the same suffocating routine. At last, she saw the folly of doggedness

All of a sudden, Sarah understood about the Enso: that Zen circle which could symbolise both fulness and emptiness.  There, even there, was a hierachy of meaning. A complete circle figured forth a potential state of enlightenment: fullness and perfection. But a broken, incomplete circle was the superior one: that one symbolised space and change, and made her aware that even enlightenment was a work-in-progress. 

Bring it on, then: the world of swirling inconsequence. She was ready to face it at last.