Originally appeared in the Herald-Zeitung, July 6-7, 2024.
We remember the popular soft drink commercials that ran for decades with the slogan: “The pause that refreshes.” Simple, easy to recall, it worked on us when we shopped. Another nod to pausing was the advice: “Count to five.” Another: “Take a deep breath.” All of these were in the service of the pause. Pausing is the other side of being so busy that we feel frenzied, overworked and overwhelmed and may suspect that a pause might refresh, but often we press on.
The pause creates a break, opens a gap, some silent space, for something or someone to enter, to be seen, to be heard, to be considered. Pausing has its own genius. It is a moment of self-consideration, even of self-care. It invites in a greater consciousness of who one is and what one thinks and does. Pausing, then, is not doing nothing.
Pausing is active, but in a more contemplative way. I say contemplative here because it relinquishes ego-control over what’s next. Pausing relinquishes ego control both of what will be and what has been.
In a very successful television series entitled The West Wing, from the genius of Aaron Sorkin that ran for 6 seasons, the president would insist from his advisors: “What’s Next?” No pause. Keep the affairs of state, the levers of power, in constant motion. Sometimes an illness, a ruptured relationship, the loss of a loved one, economic or psychological traumas, may force one to pause.
Best that the pause is an option that one can turn to when depletion is next on the agenda. It may be a conscious choice, it may be instinctive, it may be a life preserver tossed our way when we are swept downstream by objects, obsessions, others, or the squeezing necessity of finding instant solutions to complex conditions.
Vacations are ostensibly a more formalized form of pausing. Good luck. We know the response of some who are glad to be back at work after the pressing activities of a vacation that leave one seeking the workplace or simply being at home to recover.
I sense that running from pauses may be as exhausting as running from obligations. A pause is a choice of allowing oneself to be at home. In that at-home place in imagination, the pause may allow one to ask: “Why am I doing this or that?” What is its purpose? What is the value in continuing this path?” All important pause questions.
Here is my pause place. I like to rise early at 4 a.m. and have for the past 32 years. After fetching a coffee and lighting a candle in my study, I turn on my small gooseneck lamp and sit in my lounge chair. I pick up pen and journal—and then I pause. I am in between the new day just beginning, and yesterday fading now from memory. I enjoy this metaxis, a Greek word for an in-between space, the space of the pause.
I ask one question: what was joyful and challenging about yesterday when I was gifted and perhaps gifted another? I then write for about 30 minutes. It is both a pause that refreshes and a pause that remembers. Pausing, I have learned, allows that still point—where our deepest identity dwells—to be reached and renewed.
So one might ask: “how long should I pause for?” But that is an ego-control question. One might ask instead: “What has pausing allowed to open up in me, something to reconsider, or someone who needs caring for?”
Finally, we may respond to an impulse to pause with: “Catch me later; I’m busy.”It never arrives.