The Sky is Not The Limit
When she thought about it, most other beings would be quite content with the life she led. For one, there were the great views. There was so much to see down there and it was no wonder droughts were becoming more common. The sights below were just not conducive to those grey or black moods that everybody had now and then. White and fluffy contentment seemed to be the order of nearly every day. And what other being was able to change its form depending on how it was feeling?
There obviously were days when she felt down, and the fact that she had to stay up compounded it. The feeling was very contagious and often whole groups of her friends would gather together and cry for hours on end. They would eventually get over it when they remembered that their crying was in fact most necessary for the parched earth below, then the feel-good factor would return and they would lighten up, disperse and let the sky have a look at the greening work that they had done.
Her dark and heavy, and light and fluffy forms were only two of the three that she was free to choose from every day. Her constant observation of the world below often led to curiosity and the desire to have a closer look, floating down to envelope the land in an ethereal mist, while she investigated what had caught her eye from above. It was on one of these trips down to Spain that she discovered something that really captured her interest. It was quite possibly the first thing she was aware of actually learning, and fittingly, she learnt it at school.
She was wrapped around the school building and grounds one morning when it occurred to her that there might be something going on within the brick walls. She focussed on a window and tried to pick out what was going on inside. The lights were on (probably her fault, she thought, for blocking out the light) and she was able to see the teacher writing on the blackboard and the children sitting attentively at their desks, on which each had a notebook. The notebooks had white stickers on with the word ‘English’. This was a long word for her and it took her a while to assimilate the letters. She rightly guessed that this was what they were studying although she had no idea what ‘English’ was.
Her attention returned to the board where the teacher had written a word: ‘sun’. Again she had no idea what this was. The teacher held out the chalk and a forest of hands shot up. The lucky chosen one came up to the board and drew a circle with lines shooting out from it. So that was what that big, hot, yellow ball was called!
The friendly teacher nodded her approval and the child sat down satisfied. Then the teacher wrote another word on the board: ‘mountain’. Another long word and a bit more complicated for her. She had only just worked it out by the time a girl had completed her elaborate drawing of a snow-capped peak. Cool! This was easily recognisable. She’d floated above many of these ‘mountains’ in her time, and now she knew their name! She was really starting to enjoy this new discovery, although she was beginning to feel the newly-named ‘sun’ encourage her upper layers to evaporate away. She knew she didn’t have too much longer but was determined to stay and learn at least one more thing.
The teacher wrote a third word up: ‘cloud’. After the previous long word this was not too difficult to take in and she waited expectantly for a young child to take the chalk and reveal the being that had this name. The child reached the board and started to draw, but in his enthusiasm he pressed a bit too hard and the chalk broke and fell to the floor. The class laughed, as they tended to do at anything that would embarrass a friend, but the boy, cheeks slightly flushed, ignored them and picked up the chalk.
The sun was doing an effective job at vaporising her upper part and she knew she had very little time left. She just hoped she would be able to stay to see what this word ‘cloud’ was. The boy started to draw again, a looping line, up and down, now round, still looping, round again until it joined up.
She expected him to carry on with a head and some legs to depict one of those white animals that ate grass and went ‘baah!’. But he didn’t. He stepped back from the board and looked at the teacher for approval. The friendly teacher nodded again and the boy smiled and returned to his seat.
Then it hit her and the effect was profound. The boy had drawn her. She had a name, and that name was ‘cloud’. She was a cloud!
The sun completed its job and she faded away into temporary nothingness, happier than she had ever been, whispering to herself. “I’m a cloud. I’m a cloud!”
- - -
Word spread quickly through society and the new mantra, ‘I’m a cloud. I’m a cloud!’ was rapidly in common use during the exacting task of reformation. Going from nothingness to fluffiness had never been an easy task but having a fixed identity had made it that little bit easier for the clouds. Our particular cloud was now quite a celebrity and for a while she revelled in it, always responding to the inevitable questioning with patience and decorum. She was also officially decorated by cloud society with the title ‘Cloud Nine’ (formally known only as ‘Nine’) for services towards the advancement of cloud society. It was the second highest honour that existed and to date no-one had actually ever received a ‘ten’ Cloud Nine was so happy.
Unwittingly, however, she had also made misty days the top priority for a lot of the more inquisitive and excitable clouds. Quite suddenly schools and universities all over the world were finding themselves enveloped in misty mornings, something that eventually made the national news and that the authorities were at a loss to explain. The phenomenon did not last long, partly because most clouds were simply incapable of understanding what was going on in the classrooms. It abruptly came to an end however, when cloud society invoked a law that had not been in use since the late nineteenth century when thick fogs in London had caused great problems.
At that time, choosing the mist form had been the height of fashion amongst progressive clouds and so many would drop down to take a tour of London that life for the people living there had become increasingly difficult. It was then that the ‘Pea-soup regulations had been brought in. A cloud was to be limited to mist form just once a week. The London problem cleared up in no time, and the people felt they were responsible for the improvement. The cloud society had been happy for them to think that, content in the knowledge that their law had had an immediate effect.
So the ‘Pea-soup’ regulations were reintroduced and the school fad subsided. Cloud Nine, however was given special leave to descend whenever she felt like it, as cloud society wisely recognised that she had a certain special ability to interpret the human education system.
She learnt to distinguish between different subjects and discovered which ones were of particular interest to herself and her fellow clouds. Languages were great for vocabulary. She discovered that she had different names: nuage, nube, wolke and many others. However she liked ‘cloud’ best. She felt more of an affinity for English than other languages. Clouds had always felt comfortable over England, much to the chagrin of the people below.
Geography was also interesting at times, if only to see how much, or how little, humans actually knew about her and her kind. Physics and chemistry offered the occasional piece of information, whereas other subjects, history, religion, maths and the like, held nothing of interest to a cloud.
All this knowledge, much of which she passed on but little of which was assimilated by the majority of her fellows, started to make her feel different, as if she was special, capable of more than just black, rain-filled days or light-white, blue-sky ones. She was, in truth, growing tired of simply being a cloud. She felt that she had a future beyond this but she was unable to pin it down. She just knew that she had .. how to define it? .. possibilities.
- - -
This feeling did not leave her. If anything it grew with time, and her internal unrest led to a depression (why do you think the weatherman calls it that?) which converted itself into a long period of dark rainy days causing local flooding on a grand scale.
Weeks later, after the wettest month on record, Cloud Nine pulled herself out of her depression and made a decision. Knowledge had got her into this situation and knowledge would get her out of it. It was time to mistify again.
She prepared herself with a couple of white, blue-sky days, which were much appreciated by the people down below, and then she was ready for a period of closer Earth-inspection. She decided to go back to the place where she had first learnt about herself, the small Spanish school with the friendly English teacher.
She arrived early and waited. As school opened for morning class, she floated around quietly while the children walked through her mist and into the building. Then the lights went on in the English classroom and our cloud eagerly peered through the window. The children looked bigger than the kids that had helped her learn what her name was. Maybe they would be able to tell her more complicated things.
A word went up on the board: ‘Grammar:’, and a general groan went around the room. Cloud Nine’s enthusiasm faltered. If the children didn’t like this then it probably wouldn’t be worth her learning it either. But the information on the blackboard suddenly caught her attention in the same way that her own name had. ‘Grammar: Possibilities:’. Long words now held no problems for cloud nine and she was immediately aware of its meaning. She knew it was what she had felt she had and a surge of hope coursed though her. Would she find out the secret to her own future? Her complete attention was now on the teacher’s hand and the piece of chalk that might reveal what possibly lay ahead.
‘Grammar: Possibilities: Could.’ The teacher underlined the last word. So this was the word that held the key. ‘Could’. At first she was at a loss to work out its meaning but slowly it dawned on her. Her name: ‘Cloud’. Her future: ‘Could’. They were so similar that she really felt that she was capable of this possibility. That she... ‘could’.
She faded away with the help of the sun and spent the rest of the day in her ethereal form mulling over how to convert herself into a possibility. The next few days were spent in a state of internal contemplation and her reformation mantra changed from ‘I’m a cloud’ to ‘Cloud to could’.
By sunset on the fourth day she thought she had it worked out. The key was her second letter. Her ‘l’. If she were able to persuade him to move then she was sure she could become the possibility that she had dreamed about for so long.
That night she made her first approach.
“l?” she whispered to her second part. She had never spoken to a part of herself and she wasn’t even sure that he was capable of a response.
“l? Can you hear me?”
“Mmm.” In terms of a response, it was as much as a letter was capable of.
“Hey, ‘l’. I need a favour. A big one.
“Mmm?”
“Would you mind moving? I know you’ve spent your entire existence between my ‘c’ and my ‘o’, but if you would jump over a couple of letters, and slot in between my ‘u’ and my ‘d’, I’d be extremely grateful.”
‘l’ was silent for a while, presumably thinking about it, and Cloud Nine was patient. Then the response came. “Mm-mm.” The intonation betrayed the meaning. A definite ‘no’.
- - -
Cloud Nine withdrew from herself to contemplate another strategy. She was convinced of her future and she wasn’t going to give up so easily. The next day she spent as high nimbus, stretched alone across the blue sky, contemplating how far she had come on her personal journey and how close she was to completing it.
And that night she spoke to ‘l’ again. She talked of her life so far, in which he had played an important part. She talked of her conviction in her future as a perception, a possibility, and of the limitlessness of this state. She talked of how he would be the key to this change and how much she would owe him if he agreed to the move. Eventually he was convinced, and Cloud Nine was over the moon (at least when seen from certain places on the ground.)
Letter ‘l’ was nervous. He had never even thought about a journey, let alone been on one, but Cloud Nine kept whispering about the good times ahead and he held his resolve. The intrepid letter slowly inched his way up onto ‘o’s back, and stayed there for a rest. He needed time too to take in all he had on view from his new vantage point, and also to steel himself for the next, most dangerous part of the voyage. Sliding down ‘o’ would be complicated. If he was unable to stop and slipped all the way through, he would be lost into the oblivion of single-letter wasteland. The infamous place where unless you were able to find a group of 25 letters, all different from you and from each other, life was apparently an absolute nightmare. A few: ‘a’s and ‘I’s were able to cope by themselves but he had never heard of an ‘l’ making it by alone.
Cloud was also aware of the dangers. If she lost her ‘l’ she would become one of those ghostly, undiscovered beings – ‘coud’ – that only fleetingly exist under the pencil of a small child or the distraction of a writer’s keyboard. Their greatest enemies; attentive primary teachers and a computer’s spell check. (There is nothing more embarrassing for a word, discovered or not, than to be underlined in red.)
‘l’ took the utmost care and slid into place between ‘o’ and ‘u’. Seeing ‘o’ on his right was much the same as seeing him on his left which was reassuring, but his first sight of ‘u’ proved to be a bit disconcerting. He decided to spend a while adjusting to this halfway stage before continuing with the journey the next day.
It was a difficult night for our cloud, mainly because she was no longer that – a cloud. She was a ‘colud’ and hence did not really exist. If her ethereal state after cloud evaporation and before reformation had been difficult, then it in no way prepared for the absolute nothingness of being an undiscovered word. However she had no choice but to accept a night in this state.
‘l’ woke up feeling more comfortable. Nothing untoward had happened in his new, temporary home and he felt ready for the next stage. He climbed up the side of ‘u’ and then shot down quickly into his centre. The momentum took him up the other side and he made it to the top breathless, but quite exhilarated by the experience.
Now for the very last step. He very carefully made his way down the right-hand side of ‘u’, greeting ‘d’ as he did so, and settled into place between the two letters. It was all a bit strange but he somehow felt he would be at home there. He might miss ‘o’ but he only had to ask ‘u’ how his old neighbour was.
The former cloud however, underwent an absolute, and incredibly profound change. The experiences that flowed through her as she saw the limitless possibilities that her conditional condition now offered were overwhelming. It would take her some time to come to terms with everything that was happening, but she knew that her life as a perception, a possibility, would make her infinitely happy.
She could be whatever, or whoever she wanted, whenever she wanted, forever.
There obviously were days when she felt down, and the fact that she had to stay up compounded it. The feeling was very contagious and often whole groups of her friends would gather together and cry for hours on end. They would eventually get over it when they remembered that their crying was in fact most necessary for the parched earth below, then the feel-good factor would return and they would lighten up, disperse and let the sky have a look at the greening work that they had done.
Her dark and heavy, and light and fluffy forms were only two of the three that she was free to choose from every day. Her constant observation of the world below often led to curiosity and the desire to have a closer look, floating down to envelope the land in an ethereal mist, while she investigated what had caught her eye from above. It was on one of these trips down to Spain that she discovered something that really captured her interest. It was quite possibly the first thing she was aware of actually learning, and fittingly, she learnt it at school.
She was wrapped around the school building and grounds one morning when it occurred to her that there might be something going on within the brick walls. She focussed on a window and tried to pick out what was going on inside. The lights were on (probably her fault, she thought, for blocking out the light) and she was able to see the teacher writing on the blackboard and the children sitting attentively at their desks, on which each had a notebook. The notebooks had white stickers on with the word ‘English’. This was a long word for her and it took her a while to assimilate the letters. She rightly guessed that this was what they were studying although she had no idea what ‘English’ was.
Her attention returned to the board where the teacher had written a word: ‘sun’. Again she had no idea what this was. The teacher held out the chalk and a forest of hands shot up. The lucky chosen one came up to the board and drew a circle with lines shooting out from it. So that was what that big, hot, yellow ball was called!
The friendly teacher nodded her approval and the child sat down satisfied. Then the teacher wrote another word on the board: ‘mountain’. Another long word and a bit more complicated for her. She had only just worked it out by the time a girl had completed her elaborate drawing of a snow-capped peak. Cool! This was easily recognisable. She’d floated above many of these ‘mountains’ in her time, and now she knew their name! She was really starting to enjoy this new discovery, although she was beginning to feel the newly-named ‘sun’ encourage her upper layers to evaporate away. She knew she didn’t have too much longer but was determined to stay and learn at least one more thing.
The teacher wrote a third word up: ‘cloud’. After the previous long word this was not too difficult to take in and she waited expectantly for a young child to take the chalk and reveal the being that had this name. The child reached the board and started to draw, but in his enthusiasm he pressed a bit too hard and the chalk broke and fell to the floor. The class laughed, as they tended to do at anything that would embarrass a friend, but the boy, cheeks slightly flushed, ignored them and picked up the chalk.
The sun was doing an effective job at vaporising her upper part and she knew she had very little time left. She just hoped she would be able to stay to see what this word ‘cloud’ was. The boy started to draw again, a looping line, up and down, now round, still looping, round again until it joined up.
She expected him to carry on with a head and some legs to depict one of those white animals that ate grass and went ‘baah!’. But he didn’t. He stepped back from the board and looked at the teacher for approval. The friendly teacher nodded again and the boy smiled and returned to his seat.
Then it hit her and the effect was profound. The boy had drawn her. She had a name, and that name was ‘cloud’. She was a cloud!
The sun completed its job and she faded away into temporary nothingness, happier than she had ever been, whispering to herself. “I’m a cloud. I’m a cloud!”
- - -
Word spread quickly through society and the new mantra, ‘I’m a cloud. I’m a cloud!’ was rapidly in common use during the exacting task of reformation. Going from nothingness to fluffiness had never been an easy task but having a fixed identity had made it that little bit easier for the clouds. Our particular cloud was now quite a celebrity and for a while she revelled in it, always responding to the inevitable questioning with patience and decorum. She was also officially decorated by cloud society with the title ‘Cloud Nine’ (formally known only as ‘Nine’) for services towards the advancement of cloud society. It was the second highest honour that existed and to date no-one had actually ever received a ‘ten’ Cloud Nine was so happy.
Unwittingly, however, she had also made misty days the top priority for a lot of the more inquisitive and excitable clouds. Quite suddenly schools and universities all over the world were finding themselves enveloped in misty mornings, something that eventually made the national news and that the authorities were at a loss to explain. The phenomenon did not last long, partly because most clouds were simply incapable of understanding what was going on in the classrooms. It abruptly came to an end however, when cloud society invoked a law that had not been in use since the late nineteenth century when thick fogs in London had caused great problems.
At that time, choosing the mist form had been the height of fashion amongst progressive clouds and so many would drop down to take a tour of London that life for the people living there had become increasingly difficult. It was then that the ‘Pea-soup regulations had been brought in. A cloud was to be limited to mist form just once a week. The London problem cleared up in no time, and the people felt they were responsible for the improvement. The cloud society had been happy for them to think that, content in the knowledge that their law had had an immediate effect.
So the ‘Pea-soup’ regulations were reintroduced and the school fad subsided. Cloud Nine, however was given special leave to descend whenever she felt like it, as cloud society wisely recognised that she had a certain special ability to interpret the human education system.
She learnt to distinguish between different subjects and discovered which ones were of particular interest to herself and her fellow clouds. Languages were great for vocabulary. She discovered that she had different names: nuage, nube, wolke and many others. However she liked ‘cloud’ best. She felt more of an affinity for English than other languages. Clouds had always felt comfortable over England, much to the chagrin of the people below.
Geography was also interesting at times, if only to see how much, or how little, humans actually knew about her and her kind. Physics and chemistry offered the occasional piece of information, whereas other subjects, history, religion, maths and the like, held nothing of interest to a cloud.
All this knowledge, much of which she passed on but little of which was assimilated by the majority of her fellows, started to make her feel different, as if she was special, capable of more than just black, rain-filled days or light-white, blue-sky ones. She was, in truth, growing tired of simply being a cloud. She felt that she had a future beyond this but she was unable to pin it down. She just knew that she had .. how to define it? .. possibilities.
- - -
This feeling did not leave her. If anything it grew with time, and her internal unrest led to a depression (why do you think the weatherman calls it that?) which converted itself into a long period of dark rainy days causing local flooding on a grand scale.
Weeks later, after the wettest month on record, Cloud Nine pulled herself out of her depression and made a decision. Knowledge had got her into this situation and knowledge would get her out of it. It was time to mistify again.
She prepared herself with a couple of white, blue-sky days, which were much appreciated by the people down below, and then she was ready for a period of closer Earth-inspection. She decided to go back to the place where she had first learnt about herself, the small Spanish school with the friendly English teacher.
She arrived early and waited. As school opened for morning class, she floated around quietly while the children walked through her mist and into the building. Then the lights went on in the English classroom and our cloud eagerly peered through the window. The children looked bigger than the kids that had helped her learn what her name was. Maybe they would be able to tell her more complicated things.
A word went up on the board: ‘Grammar:’, and a general groan went around the room. Cloud Nine’s enthusiasm faltered. If the children didn’t like this then it probably wouldn’t be worth her learning it either. But the information on the blackboard suddenly caught her attention in the same way that her own name had. ‘Grammar: Possibilities:’. Long words now held no problems for cloud nine and she was immediately aware of its meaning. She knew it was what she had felt she had and a surge of hope coursed though her. Would she find out the secret to her own future? Her complete attention was now on the teacher’s hand and the piece of chalk that might reveal what possibly lay ahead.
‘Grammar: Possibilities: Could.’ The teacher underlined the last word. So this was the word that held the key. ‘Could’. At first she was at a loss to work out its meaning but slowly it dawned on her. Her name: ‘Cloud’. Her future: ‘Could’. They were so similar that she really felt that she was capable of this possibility. That she... ‘could’.
She faded away with the help of the sun and spent the rest of the day in her ethereal form mulling over how to convert herself into a possibility. The next few days were spent in a state of internal contemplation and her reformation mantra changed from ‘I’m a cloud’ to ‘Cloud to could’.
By sunset on the fourth day she thought she had it worked out. The key was her second letter. Her ‘l’. If she were able to persuade him to move then she was sure she could become the possibility that she had dreamed about for so long.
That night she made her first approach.
“l?” she whispered to her second part. She had never spoken to a part of herself and she wasn’t even sure that he was capable of a response.
“l? Can you hear me?”
“Mmm.” In terms of a response, it was as much as a letter was capable of.
“Hey, ‘l’. I need a favour. A big one.
“Mmm?”
“Would you mind moving? I know you’ve spent your entire existence between my ‘c’ and my ‘o’, but if you would jump over a couple of letters, and slot in between my ‘u’ and my ‘d’, I’d be extremely grateful.”
‘l’ was silent for a while, presumably thinking about it, and Cloud Nine was patient. Then the response came. “Mm-mm.” The intonation betrayed the meaning. A definite ‘no’.
- - -
Cloud Nine withdrew from herself to contemplate another strategy. She was convinced of her future and she wasn’t going to give up so easily. The next day she spent as high nimbus, stretched alone across the blue sky, contemplating how far she had come on her personal journey and how close she was to completing it.
And that night she spoke to ‘l’ again. She talked of her life so far, in which he had played an important part. She talked of her conviction in her future as a perception, a possibility, and of the limitlessness of this state. She talked of how he would be the key to this change and how much she would owe him if he agreed to the move. Eventually he was convinced, and Cloud Nine was over the moon (at least when seen from certain places on the ground.)
Letter ‘l’ was nervous. He had never even thought about a journey, let alone been on one, but Cloud Nine kept whispering about the good times ahead and he held his resolve. The intrepid letter slowly inched his way up onto ‘o’s back, and stayed there for a rest. He needed time too to take in all he had on view from his new vantage point, and also to steel himself for the next, most dangerous part of the voyage. Sliding down ‘o’ would be complicated. If he was unable to stop and slipped all the way through, he would be lost into the oblivion of single-letter wasteland. The infamous place where unless you were able to find a group of 25 letters, all different from you and from each other, life was apparently an absolute nightmare. A few: ‘a’s and ‘I’s were able to cope by themselves but he had never heard of an ‘l’ making it by alone.
Cloud was also aware of the dangers. If she lost her ‘l’ she would become one of those ghostly, undiscovered beings – ‘coud’ – that only fleetingly exist under the pencil of a small child or the distraction of a writer’s keyboard. Their greatest enemies; attentive primary teachers and a computer’s spell check. (There is nothing more embarrassing for a word, discovered or not, than to be underlined in red.)
‘l’ took the utmost care and slid into place between ‘o’ and ‘u’. Seeing ‘o’ on his right was much the same as seeing him on his left which was reassuring, but his first sight of ‘u’ proved to be a bit disconcerting. He decided to spend a while adjusting to this halfway stage before continuing with the journey the next day.
It was a difficult night for our cloud, mainly because she was no longer that – a cloud. She was a ‘colud’ and hence did not really exist. If her ethereal state after cloud evaporation and before reformation had been difficult, then it in no way prepared for the absolute nothingness of being an undiscovered word. However she had no choice but to accept a night in this state.
‘l’ woke up feeling more comfortable. Nothing untoward had happened in his new, temporary home and he felt ready for the next stage. He climbed up the side of ‘u’ and then shot down quickly into his centre. The momentum took him up the other side and he made it to the top breathless, but quite exhilarated by the experience.
Now for the very last step. He very carefully made his way down the right-hand side of ‘u’, greeting ‘d’ as he did so, and settled into place between the two letters. It was all a bit strange but he somehow felt he would be at home there. He might miss ‘o’ but he only had to ask ‘u’ how his old neighbour was.
The former cloud however, underwent an absolute, and incredibly profound change. The experiences that flowed through her as she saw the limitless possibilities that her conditional condition now offered were overwhelming. It would take her some time to come to terms with everything that was happening, but she knew that her life as a perception, a possibility, would make her infinitely happy.
She could be whatever, or whoever she wanted, whenever she wanted, forever.