My favorite re-usable shopping bag has a picture of Godzilla on it, yelling, “So much to do” while holding a bunch of other shopping bags. It makes me laugh every time I see it. Check it out:

I feel another, less amusing connection with Godzilla: When I’m busy, I often forget to stop working, and I forget to eat. I get hangry and tired, and sometimes I start roaring. The roaring and stomping never resolves whatever it was I got upset about. Usually it makes things worse.

The thing is, if I just keep working until I “feel like” stopping, I won’t stop until it’s too late. I won’t stop until I’m too irritable to focus, or to make good decisions. Kirk Byron Jones writes about how, in American culture, we chronically push ourselves to keep going, beyond the point of being productive and living well — in fact, to the point of sabotaging those things:

It is not that we completely ignore the signs of fatigue and exhaustion, but we condition ourselves to rest only as we near the breaking-point — and even then just long enough to feel the first pulsations of renewed energy. The result is a life always on the brink of fatigue — or, even more tragic, an early death resulting from cumulative stress and tension. (Jones 2001, Kindle Locations 409-411)

You need to press pause on the stream of input during the day. You need to take a little time each day to step back. As a full human person, you need time to think. (And it takes time to think!)

And you need time to stop thinking: time to rest your mind. You need time to remember your priorities when you get caught up in the relentless swirl of incoming, on and off screens. You need regular time to sort your signals, to collect yourself, to remember what you are about.

The Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast talked about pauses as a three step process:

In practice I find there are three steps: pause, become aware, respond. I have to build moments of stillness into my daily life, over and over again; otherwise the flow of my activity will drag me along with it. Pausing: that is the first point. Then comes the awareness: what opportunities is life offering me here and now? And in the third step I respond through my doing: I make use of the opportunity given. Those are three steps I return to again and again. Three steps—perhaps because I am from Vienna, and we dance our Viennese waltzes in three-quarter time. So: pause, become aware, and respond by doing. That seems to me to be the recipe for a fulfilled life. (Steindl-Rast and Grun 2016, p 95)

Cheat-sheet version:

1. Pause.

2. Become aware of what opportunities life is offering you here and now.

3. Respond by doing.

A pause is a break, a little solitude mini-vacation where you deliberately step away from the hubbub and take time to hear your own thoughts, or just rest your mind and allow it to sort itself out.

And crucially, a pause is also giving yourself time away from the input of other minds:

Solitude…can be found as readily while sitting alone in a restaurant as it can on Mount Rainier. It is not an objective concept but a subjective one. It is, simply, a subjective state of mind, in which the mind, isolated from input from other minds, works through a problem on its own. That isolation can be sustained, as it was for Thoreau or is for a long-distance runner. Or it can be intermittent, as it might be for a person who reads a book—which of course is a collection of someone else’s thoughts—and then pauses occasionally to think through a passage’s meaning. (Kethledge, Erwin 2017, pp xviii-xix).

You can’t think for yourself if you don’t take time apart from the thoughts of others.

Pressing “pause” throughout the day to just stop for a few moments allows your brain to shift contexts and sift through priorities as conditions change.

For me, the practice of pausing is especially important in December, the month my calendar tilts into overload.

Pressing Pause Re-orients You to What Is Most Important

When I think of pausing, I think of taking out a compass from a backpack and waiting for the needle to settle so I can I figure out where I am now, and what my next best step is.

Instead of letting yourself devolve into Godzilla, time alone — time free from the input of other minds — is what allows you to reconfigure yourself, as Brent Crane puts it:

…when people remove themselves from the social context of their lives, they are better able to see how they’re shaped by that context… Much of this self-reconfiguring happens through what [sociologist Jack Fong] calls “existentializing moments,” mental flickers of clarity which can occur during inward-focused solitude. (Crane 2017)

Time to think your own thoughts for a while restores your personhood and brings you back to yourself. And as Kethledge and Erwin pointed out, solitude is a state of mind, not necessarily related to the presence or absence of others.

Taking a pause can also be what reminds you to treat others as persons.

When my children were young, the times when I remembered to pause when I was feeling upset, the times when I remembered to pause before responding, were — without exception — the times I was a better parent.

Pausing gave me the opportunity to reorient myself to my deeper values and longterm hopes for myself and my relationships. (What this looked like in real life was often me chanting to myself, “People before things… People before things… — but I loooved that vase!*— … People before things…”)

You give yourself a time-out from the immediate heat. You take some deep breaths and ask, “What is most important here, now and in the long-term? What is the best way I can respond to this situation?” And a wiser response emerges, from giving yourself time to reorient yourself to who you want to be, and to what is important in the long-term. (Living creatures and relationships before inanimate objects!)

Pausing — when I remembered to do it — allowed me to respond as the kind of parent I aspired to be, instead of the Godzilla I sometimes felt like inside. I’m far from a perfect parent, but making time to take some deep breaths and take a mental break allowed me to be a better parent.

Constant Input is a Form of Self-Violence

Being able to pause, to step back from the input of other minds, other opinions, external noise, is essential to maintaining our personhood. Subjecting minds to relentless input such as music you cannot turn off, is quite literally a form of torture, used to break persons down.

And yet often in the anxiety of so much to do!!!!!, we subject ourselves to relentless input and activity without pause. Thomas Merton put it more bluntly: we commit self-violence.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence... [and that is] activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fullness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes work fruitful. (Merton 1968)

Food for thought: Merton wrote that more than a half century ago.

In American culture, taking time to pause — time to think your own thoughts without input from other minds — is too often seen as “not doing anything.” Taking time to think is seen as “not doing anything.”

But pausing, thinking your own thoughts, is not a luxury. It is as essential to your well-being as eating and sleeping.

Believing pauses are non-productive or unnecessary is a cultural blindspot. As adults we are not taught or encouraged to pause during the day. We are taught to keep pushing, “[afflicting ourselves] and others, with the violence of overload and hurry.” (Jones 2001, Kindle location 194)

Yet we do have pockets, we do have some communities in our culture, where pauses are built in. When you are managing a group, if you want something to happen, you must create an external structure for it ahead of time. You must set aside a time, a place, and whatever materials are needed, for that thing to happen.

Elementary schools and monasteries create time for pauses.

How do you keep 20 or more children in a classroom from climbing the walls and sticking gum in each others’ hair? Recess and lunch. Elementary schools schedule times, ahead of time, for recess (Exercise! Play time!), and lunch. It’s not left up to students and teachers to become aware of needing a break. That time is built in.

I find it helpful to give myself something like an elementary school schedule: desk time, but also time for recess, time to make some art, time to eat, time to spend with my friends. The better I get at setting aside times to pause, the less likely I am to turn into Godzilla.

Once when I was roaring around and felt like knocking down some cities, I had the good sense to call my mother first. (To be clear, I got the good sense to call my mother, who is a wise and compassionate woman, because first I took a pause; and then the thought came to me that the next best step at that moment, was to call my mother. And it was.) She listened to me rant about something out of my control, sympathized, and then said, "Sometimes it helps to see yourself as a two-year-old, and give yourself what a two-year-old needs; which is usually a nap or a snack."

I feel like I’m becoming a monster whenever I stop treating myself like a real human person.

Coincidence? I think not. We don’t outgrow basic human needs. Even when we are 27 or 42 or 68 or 95 years old, we still need breaks, sleep, play, time with friends, and lunch; in order to function well.

Monastic communities also create time and space for pauses. Joan Chittister writes about how a group of young women who planned to enter monastic life missed that it is the underlying structure of the schedule that’s key:

I asked [them] once why they went to prayer with the community every day, and I got the most impressive yet saccharine answers I could ever have imagined: “Because I love God”; “Because prayer is essential for everyone”; “Because it is deepening my relationship with Jesus.”

“No, no, no,” I said to them answer after answer. Finally, one of them, exasperated, had the good sense to stop the merry-go-round.

“If none of those answers are right,” she said, “then why do we go to community prayer?”

“We go to prayer,” I said, “because the bell rings.”

I could see their shock at the simplicity, the obvious clarity of the answer. Monastics go to community prayer because it is time for community prayers and those wonderful life-stopping bells call us there. (Chittister 2021, p 43)

Monastic communities also set aside regular times for individual reflection and prayer. For solitude.

Notice that elementary schools and monasteries don’t rely on people’s personal feelings that it is time to press pause. They just schedule the bells to tell people it is time. Time out. Time to stop. Decisions on when to pause, to reset, to return, are built into the systems. And so is the baseline recognition that pressing pause multiple times a day is essential.

We can decide ahead of time how and when we will pause, too.

I resisted this idea for many years, thinking a schedule would make me less creative. But it is the schedule that gives my spontaneous side the mental and physical time and space to relax enough to be creative. If I leave the management of my daily life to Spontaneous Anna, I don’t work as well and I don’t rest as well, and I then have to use Spontaneous Anna’s creativity (which I want to make new interesting things with) to redo boring but necessary things.

Plan to pause throughout your day like you plan to eat, or plan to sleep. We need to eat and sleep. We also need to rest our minds and reorient ourselves.

Some Ways to Press Pause

Taking time to pause is seen as “not doing anything,” but not taking time to pause can be far more costly to yourself, your work, your play, and your relationships.

Pausing — regularly — is a crucial part of getting the right things done, in the right spirit.

But don’t confuse a pause with, say, a formal meditation practice. This is much less rigid. Think: recess, taking a break, giving your mind a little vacation, giving your senses time to play. You could meditate as one of your daily pauses; but not if meditation feels like soooo much to do!!!.

I find combining pauses with a simple physical activity is the most useful for settling my mind.

When I’m working from home and need a break from the computer, there are floors to sweep, dishes to load, laundry to fold — repetitive, rhythmic activities that allow good insights to bubble up (I always carry a pocket notebook, just in case an idea stops by). Sometimes I clear my mind by straightening things on and around my desk.

You can also pause by taking a walk, getting up to stretch. (Another saying I tell myself when I feel my inner Godzilla stirring: “Move a muscle, change a thought.”)

I also like to pause by watching the birds in my backyard. When I took a pause while writing this, I saw a red-bellied woodpecker on the suet!

If you need to pause while you are in a meeting, and it would be very uncool to walk out, bring a physical notebook to meetings. Take handwritten notes, doodle in the margins if you need to detach a bit. Bring knitting, if you knit (I don’t, but I admire those who do).

Close the door. Step outside for a moment. Hide in the bathroom.

Get up a little earlier; arrive somewhere a little earlier to give yourself time to orient yourself, time to settle your thoughts.

A friend sets alarms on her cell phone to remind herself to pause, and yes, the alarms sound like (pleasant) bells. And then — need it be said? — she puts down the phone. A pause is freedom from input from other minds.

I have chronically underestimated how much time it takes me to think. But in the end, pressing pause throughout the day, and taking longer periods of time alone each week, gives me back so much more time than it takes.

I get back on track.

I am re-oriented to my true values.

I remember to treat myself and others like persons.

I check my compass, turn around, and move again in the right direction.

And Godzilla just lives on my shopping bag.

References

J.N.U. (January 08, 2020) It’s Not in Your Head: Feeling Hangry Is a Very Real Thing, Health.com. Available at: https://www.health.com/nutrition/what-is-hangry (Accessed: 8 December 2021).

Jones, K.B. (2001) Rest in the Storm: Self-Care Strategies for Clergy and Other Caregivers. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Pr. Kindle Edition.

Steindl-Rast, D. and Grün, A. (2016) Faith beyond Belief: Spirituality for Our Times. Edited by J. Kaup. Translated by L.M. Maloney. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press.

Kethledge, R.M., Erwin, M.S. and Collins, J. (2017) Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude. 1st edition. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Kindle Edition.

Crane, B. (2017) Being Alone Can Be Good for Your Mental Health, The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/the-virtues-of-isolation/521100/ (Accessed: 3 December 2021).

Merton, T. (1968) Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Reissue edition. New York: Image.

Chittister, J. (2021) The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life. New York: Convergent Books.

Red-bellied Woodpecker Identification, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology (no date). Available at: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-bellied_Woodpecker/id (Accessed: 10 December 2021).

Museum Wax (no date) Preservation Equipment Ltd. Available at: https://www.preservationequipment.com/Catalogue/Display-Products/Display-Identification/Museum-Wax-P615-8000 (Accessed: 10 December 2021).

Notes

*”People before things…. “ And museum wax so you can have it all: cats, dogs, people, and tchotchkes. You can get this stuff at Walmart and Amazon, but I love this site’s description of how to use it:

Museum Wax - previously known as 'Be still my art'.

Protect your valuable collections from bumps, quakes, jolts. A special blend of microcrystalline waxes makes Museum Wax safe for use on crystal, porcelain, marble glass, ceramic and wood finishes. Perfect for mounting breakable objects to shelves, stands and display cases. Performs well as a temporary "glue" to hold items in place whilst being cleaned, repaired or photographed. To use, attach a pea size bead to the contact base of your object, then with a slightly twisting motion, press your piece into place.

To remove simply twist and lift. Scrape up the excess wax for reuse and wipe away any residue with a soft cloth.

It’s great stuff.