I wrote once about a line I'd carried around for years without really living it — that life happens in the pause. It took losing people during COVID to make that real instead of just interesting. Since then, I've been trying to actually practice it, in small ways. One habit that's helped more than I expected: pausing for twenty seconds to just breathe. It sounds too small to matter. But whenever I remember to do it — usually somewhere in the middle of a hectic workday, or stu