V

“When you see a fork in the road, take it.”
-Yogi Berra

The letter ‘V’ looks great on a page, doesn’t it? Majestic yet simple – two slanted lines rising up simultaneously from a common source, reaching toward different places in the sky. Some letters just have a way about them, a natural panache that other letters lack.

Contemplating the letter ‘V’ I realize that I’ve actually been sensing, without quite realizing it, that each letter captures some essential quality of human thought and desire. Together they can be used as a lexicon of much that matters to us, but that we hardly ever articulate. For example, our discussion the other day around the letter ‘S’ captured some of this – the way its form visually suggests both transitions and relationships between opposites, and how the two poles of any such dialectic loom far larger in our perception than all that lies between.

Just as the letter ‘U’ may represent turning back, ‘Y’ can be a choice glimpsed in the distance, whereas ‘V’ is the choice that is now upon you, the one that can no longer be put off. ‘T’ suggests a stopping point, the place at which you may need to abandon your current path entirely and make a hard choice. But by the same token, it also suggests a new adventure about to begin.

‘L’ is the sudden change of direction that reorients your thinking, and ‘Z’ the crooked path that will leave you continuing on your original journey, but perhaps with some unexpected life experience gained along the way. ‘O’ is finding you’ve been going in circles (a pattern I find all too familiar in my own experience, sad to say).

‘X’ is perhaps the best form of all – a sign of those rare and wonderful moments in life when you encounter someone and realize that, in some important way, your paths have crossed.