Love Reflects in the Mirror of Pause

 

Albert Einstein: “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

Most of the time we feel that only moving and running define the journey. Wait. It's a great mirage. It's generally the pause that resets new choices, fresh options and possibilities to define the path. It allows the chaos to sink in and give you clarity of perspective. Hitting the pause button is often more paying than the start button. Simply because such pauses are really creative. In pause you simply rest on the seat of soul, the real you, the essentially loving, compassionate, kind and generous being. All these are always in us, but we tend to forget as we huff and puff without rest and respite.

Bruce Feiler said, “Take a walk with a turtle and behold the world in a pause.”

Pause is the pathway for your heart to map out its route. It draws you closer to the soul. You listen to the unified notes of the ultimate song and the melody of love.

When things are spinning out of control, pause, the basic building block of patience, is the remedy. You just see things more clearly. So leave the chaotic scene for some time. Soak in silence and solitude. Most of the times, things simply get along just because we are no longer poking our nose like a futile struggle in quagmire.

Life is full of crazy, ugly and complicated things. These create the so-called crisis. But pause button is always in our hands. The bugs of disorderliness lose the oxygen they thrive upon. It's a great button in your hands, I tell you. Not that I am asking you to put yourself into pause in front of a train. That is foolishness. To jump out of the tracks will be normal precautionary reaction. Pause applies to so many unnecessary mental webs that hardly leave any effect on your situation. It saves energy. Pause is the silence when you hear the voice of your real self, your closest buddy, your craziest lover who never betrays you.

Jerzy Kosinski: “The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.”

Why do you think nature has given us sleep? It's the most rewarding time for your physical and mental being. Your damaged cells get repaired. You get rejuvenated for the next day's wear and tear. Well, that is what pause does to you in your life's struggle.

You must have observed that in a turbulent pond, beautiful interplay of white domes of cloud in the sky doesn’t reflect clearly. Well, same is the condition with our minds and on a larger scale in society and civilizations. Just like the sky shines clearly in the calm waters of a pond, truth shines in a well-paused, restful moment.

We have to understand the value of rest and pause because it’s the mute button that helps us in realizing our essentially loving nature. In stampede we forget and the fight or flight instincts bring out animalistic reactions, which over a period become habits, almost first nature, and we start identifying ourselves with these reactions only. But let me tell you, reactions never define your essential being. They are mere flimsy waves on the surface. 

You run after a thing, struggle and toil for it to the chronic pain of your bones, and much deservedly you land up at the destination. You have achieved your thing. It’s the time to cherish its worth, its value for you. It’s time to celebrate and pause and allow the feeling to sink in. What value the victory carries if you cannot even spare the time and pause to allow the feeling to seep into the perspiring pores of your skin, allowing cool calmness to kiss the limits of your soul. But it almost never happens. The pause, the rest is ever elusive.

You achieve your target and the thing turns out to be valueless. The things, goals and destinations that you get, achieve and reach become almost insignificant the moment you nail it. It’s always a struggle for more in future. The dream value, which was earlier carried by the things and destinations where you stand now, shifts again to some another milestone in future. So again we drop our present and run after future. Consequently, it’s never living in the present.

Only living in present can provide spontaneity to your compassionate instincts to curb down the customary reactions born of hate, hurt, jealousy and anger.

So much so for the futile chase! The mirage keeps on shifting on the hot sands of our bloodied battle. And we run, madly, trampling the things and the moments that are the only possessions we have in reality and could have enjoyed, and rush for future, for virtual things in mind, in the form of ever-escaping criteria of values, goals and destinations. No wonder, we never live our present. We hardly enjoy the victories and rewards our sweat has fetched us. We abandon the real rewards. We trample the true trophies of the present.

You get the thing and it loses its value. No surprise that we feel so deprived, poor, cheated, underachieved and unhappy at the end of the journey when we fall. We hate any talk of pause in life. Little do we realize, a restless run results in a fatigued, huffing fall at a time when legs cannot carry the weight anymore, eyes fail to see the light any further and heart gives up even the last hope. There can’t be a bigger, more painful defeat.

A run or a walk is well managed with intervals of pause and rest at the milestones we cross. It reinvigorates you for the next leg of the journey.

Pause is blissful. It gives you the beautiful gift of accepting your present. A man, an animal, a vehicle, a civilization or for that matter anything, all need pause at intervals to maintain the journey, to save a fatigue and burnout. Unfortunately that is what we are not doing. Individually and collectively, we are headed down the precipice. The mad onslaught of modern civilization, with its plunder of natural resources and unchecked technological growth, needs a pause, for survival, for continuation of the journey.

Don’t you think that our mad rush has given cancer and tumors to mother earth? Human ailments are simply a spillover of the disease we have been giving to Mother Nature. We are far advanced down the technological lane. Let’s pause now. First allow the horizontal spread of the utilities and benefits to the poorest of the poor. Let’s put a pause on population growth rates, exploitation of natural resources, scientific spurts and industrial productions. The modern civilization has gone too far with its unchecked growth. Unchecked growth is self-destructive. It’s nothing but cancer. The planet is carrying a cancer now. It needs to be checked. Let there be a pause, please!