Glorious Pauses

Have you ever caught yourself saying or doing some thing and then pausing to make sure that you believe it is what you really wanted to do or say? As I age, I find myself doing this more and more and I’m pretty happy about it.

That pause, see what I just did there? Commas are beautiful things because they cause you to pause, not for an hour but just for half a second. And that pause, used effectively and courageously, can change the world… Perhaps change the universe itself!

Freud’s prime directive (my paraphrase) is you make the unconscious conscious and then when it is conscious, you can now choose. While that thing remains unconscious it has the potential to be incredibly damaging to our lives. We have thousands of neural pathways that help us run our every day lives. Our brains are very thankful that we don’t have to pause and think before we turn left into our driveway instead of right into the flower bed, we close the refrigerator door after opening it or we jump in front of a bus to pull our precious grand child out of great harm.

But if everything in our lives is left up to a reflex response neural pathway we will surely be unable to live the lives we really choose to live. To pause, (I did it again didn’t I), when you are in your “hurried getting ready for work in the morning” neural pathway in order to tell your wife she looks lovely in that color she’s wearing. Pausing, on your walk from the garage to the house to take in the magnificent sunset laid out before you. Pausing, to rethink the third word in the sentence you’re about to say to the car rental agent behind the counter. 

That is when we get to choose. Choose to be better, more loving, more intentional, and more there. Choosing, instead of simply reacting, is what makes us human. Gloriously human… It is the gloriously human condition played out thousands of times throughout our day. What an amazing journey we are on!