Life Happens in the Pause

I came across a line years ago: “Life's in the pause.” At the time it just felt interesting — something worth remembering, even though I didn't really understand what it meant. I kept it somewhere in the back of my head for years without doing anything with it.

For a long time before that, life had mostly felt like movement. Doing more, wanting more, chasing whatever felt important that week. New things to buy, new goals to hit, always something next in line. Nobody around me questioned it much. I didn't either.

Then COVID happened. Not just the lockdown part — the part where people I knew, and people at the edges of my circle, started getting seriously sick. A few of them didn't make it.

That's when the line stopped being an idea and started being something I actually understood. It wasn't abstract anymore. Watching illness move through people close to me made the pause real in a way no amount of thinking about it ever had.

Once things opened back up, I didn't want to go straight back to the same motion. Time with family stopped being something I'd get to eventually. Conversations stopped feeling like something to rush through on the way to whatever was next. None of this was new information, exactly — I think I'd always known it, somewhere. I just hadn't acted on it.

I still haven't gone back to moving the way I used to, even years later. Not because the pandemic is still going on — it isn't — but because I don't think I need another one to remember what that pause actually taught me.

Life doesn't only happen in the movement. It's in the pause too — not some big, dramatic stop, just the small ones. Before a reaction. Between one thing and the next. The kind we usually walk straight through without noticing.