"The Stop": Giving attention to things that stop you in your tracks as you read

David Appelbaum, The Stop (1995)


A "stop" is something that stops you (in your reading, in your observations, in your teaching/ learning). The metaphor is suddenly coming across a big rock in your path that stops you from smooth and continuous (and unconscious) walking. It must be attended to. It is a moment that allows for an opening to new paths, new ideas, new approaches if  you are able to give it the attention it demands.

A stop in your reading might be something you didn't expect -- something confusing, or difficult, or exceptionally beautiful, or something you strongly agree or disagree with, or an unknown word or phrase. A stop touches you deeply in some way (by irritating, or moving, or perplexing you, for example).

The stops allow for a change of heart, a change of mind, a political and/or intellectual engagement, a reconsideration of strategy, or even a reconsideration of world view.

From Lynn Fels, "Coming into presence: The unfolding of a moment" (Journal of Educational

Controversy):



"A stop is a calling to attention; a coming to the crossroads, in which a choice of action or direction must be taken, oft-times blindly, as experienced by Appelbaum’s (1995) blind man as he tap-taps the obstacles he encounters with his white cane—there are as yet unknown consequences of the subsequent action or decision as yet to be taken and embodied.


Between closing and beginning lives a gap, a caesura, a discontinuity.

The betweenness is a hinge that belongs to neither one nor the other.
It is neither poised nor unpoised, yet moves both ways . . .
It is the stop. (Applebaum, 1995, pp. 15-16)


A stop is a moment that tugs on our sleeve, a moment that arrests our habits of engagement, a moment within which horizons shift, and we experience our situation anew. A stop occurs when we come to see or experience things, events, or relationships from a different perspective or understanding; a stop is a moment that calls us to mindful awareness of Arendt’s appeal for renewal through action in the gap between past and future.


How we choose to respond and how that choice of action or non-action impacts on our lives and on the lives of those around us speaks to the risk, the opportunity, to the possibility of action. As media philosophers Taylor and Saarinen (1994) remind us, in spaces as familiar as the London tube, or as unmapped as cyberspace, we must “mind the gap” (p. 5). Applebaum’s moments of stop are moments that call our attention to the gap; moments that interrupt, that provoke new questioning, that evoke response, reflection, and hopefully, lead to meaningful and moral action."