The Pause

Between what happens to you and what you do about it, there is a gap.

Your power lives in that gap. All of it.

You will need to be reminded of this constantly, because you will forget it constantly. Something hits. You react. And then, a beat too late, you reflect — and the reflection comes with regret.

What if you had paused?

That is the whole story of most bad moments. Not that the wrong thing happened to you. That you answered it before you chose your answer. The pause was available. You skipped it. And the version of you that skips the pause is the version that later wishes he had not.

A reaction is what happens when you let the trigger write your response for you.

It is the common reply. The automatic one. The one absent of any thought. It surrenders to emotion. It bends to social pressure. It says the thing you cannot take back and does the thing you have to apologize for. And it leaves you standing in the wreckage, knowing you were capable of better, frustrated that you gave the better answer away for nothing.

The pause is where the better answer lives.

One beat. That is all it takes. One held breath between the trigger and your reply, and suddenly you are choosing instead of being chosen for. The same situation, the same provocation — but now there is a man in the gap making a decision, instead of a current running through an empty channel.

Because that is what the reaction is. A current.

There is a stream that carries the masses along — the automatic, the reactive, the unexamined. It pulls everyone who will not pause. It carries them down the mindless path of an unlearned life, reacting and regretting, reacting and regretting, all the way to the end, never once stepping out of the water to ask if they wanted to go where it was taking them.

Do not get carried.

Pause. Choose. Respond.

Step out of the current and onto the bank, where a man decides for himself.

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” — Epictetus