Ripple Effect: Stop

Stop what you are doing, look up, and say “Thank you.”

Stop what you are doing and say “I love you” to the people you care about.

Stop what you are doing and regain perspective on everything you think is shitty in your life.

Stop and take a breath. Be thankful that you can.

My world stopped this week. A close friend of one of my daughters died suddenly.

A sweet, vibrant, beautiful 14-year-old girl… gone without a warning.

We felt as if our hearts stopped beating, too.

The girl’s family’s life has been changed forever.

A young life stopped too soon.

There are no words.

Nothing to say.

I wanted time to stop time the moment before we sat our child down to tell her about the loss of her friend, because I knew she would never be the same.

Stop and take this world in with all its wonder, yet recognize that there is also sometimes senseless tragedy.

One of my students once told me that on his block in south central Los Angeles eight baby boys were born in the same month. These boys all grew up together, played together in the back yard of one of the grannies.

They joined the gang together and were in and out of juvenile detention facilities together.

“I am the only one left of the eight,” he said.

“Everyone has been killed, shot, or died of an overdose.“

He was 16 when he told me this.

“Ms.,” he asked me, “when will it stop?”

“With you,” I said.

“It stops with you, but it is up to you to make it happen.”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know if I can.”

“You can and you will,” I told him.

It has been years since that conversation. I think like seven or eight years.

In the week that my world stopped I ran into him. I didn’t recognize him.

From the thin, lost, young man, he turned into a strapping adult.

He works at a UPS store where I happened to stop by to drop off a return box to Amazon.

“Hey,” he said to me. “I know you. You’re the relationship lady.”

I stopped in my tracks.

“I’m here,” he told me. “I made it stop with me.”

He laughed. I cried.

He showed me a photo of his children.

He cleaned his act up, got a job, moved out of the hood.

He stopped the cycle.

In a week when hope left my existence, he showed up, and, for a moment, was able to stop my despair.

“Ms., remember how you told me that for things to stop, you gotta move and for things to move, you gotta stop?”

Honestly, I think to myself, I have no recollection of ever saying that.

I am not even sure I know what it means.

He looks at me and smiles a smile of triumph. “You were right!”

My daughter asked how is it that the world is not stopping when our heart is so broken.

I told her that the world cannot stop because of broken hearts, because it is the world continuing to move that heals our heart.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “I don’t either,” I said and held her close to me.

Stop, breathe, move, be!

Make it happen, do!

You never know when something will stop you in your tracks.

Naomi Ackerman is a Mom, activist, writer, performer, and the founder and Executive Director of The Advot (ripple) Project a registered 501(c)3 that uses theatre and the arts to empower youth at risk to live their best life.