Like everybody else, I suppose, I have been in a state of mild shock and dismay at the sudden death of Alex Salmond. Such traumatic events make one doubt pretty much everything. In particular, your ability to manage and/or cope with events. Losing someone who loomed so large in the independence movement inevitably prompts us to ask, what the hell do we do now?
There is always the sense that the loss of such a hugely significant figure must have consequences for the cause he championed so tirelessly for so long. There is a hiatus while we wonder what the consequences may be. Unable to know, we naturally fear the worst. Which is in many ways a good thing, as the worst usually does not happen. Which may well be a bad thing, as we feel pangs of guilt at not being more deeply affected by the loss.
(This guilt may go long way to explaining the phenomenon of 'sports mourning', or competitive grieving. But that is for another time.)
Moving on is difficult. It seems disrespectful to so much as suggest the possibility of simply picking up where we left off and carrying on as planned. Some devil in our psyche tries to persuade us that sit is not yet time to move on. That moving on now is somehow to diminish the loss and belittle the lost. We know that life goes on. But can it possibly go on as before? We know that our cause is as it was. But can we continue to fight that cause as we did?
That the untimely death of Alex Salmond will cause upheaval is hardly to be doubted. Disruption can be a beneficial thing. It depends on where parts settle when they eventually do. As they eventually must. Some will insist that this is hardly the time to be indulging in speculation about what form the independence movement might take as it reshapes itself following the departure of such a large and important component. But ask yourself what the man himself would be doing were he in our shoes. He would be doing what he always did - and did for the most part exceptionally well. He would be calculating even as he mourned. He would be checking all possible moves on the chessboard of politics.
Were Alex Salmond here, he would already know what form he wanted the independence movement to take. He would already have plotted his first moves in making it so.
There is danger that the professional politicians will see in this disruption an opportunity for retrenchment. A chance to shore up their positions while potential challengers are distracted. We must not allow this! If we would commemorate the life and work of Alex Salmond, there could be no better memorial than an independence movement revitalised and radicalised. A more assertive and even aggressive force. It is time for the independence movement to become Scotland's liberation movement.