STOP STARTING START STOPPING

If life feels like one big to-do list, learning how to pause could help, says Robert Poynton, who believes it’s not about how you cram more into your life, but how you get more out

Not long ago, my sister and her husband visited me where I live in northern Spain and I took them on a mountain walk. I noticed they kept stopping. Or to be more accurate, I noticed that I had stopped stopping. I often walk on my own and I realised that, over time, I had become almost entirely focused on getting to the top, taking pride in how quickly I could do so. The walk had become another goal to be achieved, rather than an experience to be enjoyed. Yet why bother with a mountain walk if you never pause to take it all in? I was missing the point as well as the view.

The idea of stopping can be simultaneously attractive and scary. Pressures and habits of life can make it hard to pause for a few days, or even for a few seconds. Sometimes a pause may be so slight that it is easy to forget, ignore or skip over. We are all prey to this. I catch myself filling in the little gaps in the day, making calls or sending emails between bigger tasks. As we constantly push on from one thing to the next, we can become our ‘to-do’ lists. Little by little, we learn to live with less of ourselves.

HOW TO PAUSE

It doesn’t have to be this way. However, it means a radical rethink of our understanding of time and how we live in it.

We have to challenge some deeply held assumptions, including the idea that the more you do, the better it is – an idea so widespread that it is taken for granted. It works up to a point. However, the negatives – stress and tension – soon outweigh the benefits.

Underlying this is another powerful idea: that time is a scarce commodity, so you should use it efficiently. It would make sense if we were machines, but we’re not. Our fulfilment does not derive from being as efficient as possible. Time, as we experience it, is not made up of regular, interchangeable units; we don’t feel every minute, hour, day or year in the same way. A minute waiting for the bus is not the same as a minute doing press-ups or a minute savouring the taste of ice cream. Time is an aspect of our experience, not a commodity.

It is simplistic to believe that the answer is just to put the brakes on. Technology will continue to accelerate, dragging us with it. If you make slowing things down a goal, it sets you

up to fail. And since speed is always relative, quite what it means to be slow is not necessarily clear. How slow is slow? Today’s slow, or tomorrow’s? My slow or your slow?

The idea of ‘work-life balance’ doesn’t help either. It sets up work and life as opposites, squabbling over their fair share of time. The importance we give to work makes it an unequal battle and, more often than not, what we refer to as ‘life’ gets squeezed. The distinction also misrepresents both. On the one hand, any work worth doing has some kind of life or liveliness in it – no amount of time off makes up for ‘deathly’ work. On the other hand, there is plenty that we have to work at outside the office, in our own lives – personal relationships, for example.

So, instead of trying to manage your time, pay more attention to finding your rhythm. The big advantage with pausing is that it is neither a short-term hack, nor a complicated process that obliges you to redesign your whole life. Anyone can think about where or how pauses show up, or are absent, in their own life or work. Pausing is very do-able.

WHY PAUSE

Pause is an antidote to the overwhelming and simplistic idea of non-stop activity. It acts as a switch to give you access to other aspects of your nature. As yeast leavens bread, so pause lightens and enriches our experience. It allows us to think in other ways, using other qualities of mind: imagination, emotion, association, intuition, contemplation. And as just a small amount of yeast makes light of heavy dough, a small amount of pause here and there can leaven or lighten your life. You don’t need much but it is a vital ingredient.

It’s why writers try not to stop at the end of a section of text, but to make a small start on the next one before they take a break. That way, this quieter mind is already working invisibly in the background on the next piece. When you get back to your desk, it brings new insights that have bubbled up in the interim. It is this

Instead of trying to manage your time, pay more attention to finding your rhythm

‘undermind’ that impregnates the pause, leading to the more visible ‘eureka’ moments.

Even if you are busy, try leaving your desk, go outside and walk once around the block. By slowing down your movements you can create a sense of time and space where there appears to be none. For a similar reason, people trained in emergency response are told not to run to a casualty because even in those extreme circumstances, it is more important to collect your thoughts than arrive a few seconds earlier.

A book lends itself well to pausing — you get to choose when to dwell on something, when to re-read a sentence, or when to put the book down, which is one of the joys of reading. You might take that moment to enjoy the view, or notice how you feel, or let your mind wander. The book will still be here for you later, to pick up again whenever you wish.

In a pause you can question existing ways of acting, have new ideas or simply appreciate the life you are living. Without ever stopping to observe yourself, how can you explore what else you might do or who you might become? If you always head on relentlessly, where is room for the heart? A pause allows something to happen which would otherwise not occur and you never quite know what that will be.

There are many possible reasons to pause, ways to pause and lengths of pause. You can play around and choose whatever suits you. It’s a very plastic concept but one worth spending a little time with.