Can we dare to pause???

Pause is that which reveals the grey areas, which makes the contrasts more visible, which wakes one up or puts one to sleep. It is a stepping stone for one who wants to rise up and that which holds one from falling down.

Do you remember those days when tape recorders used to have forward, rewind, stop, record, play and pause buttons. Applying these functions to life in this information era it is clear that we no more have control over what we can choose to play, nor stop ourselves from hearing to what is being played around. Neither every rewind gives us the same record nor every prediction of forward times the same. We could record things as they are happening, but no guarantee that they will remain the same the next minute in these dynamically changing times. I think the only control we have in our hands is the “pause” button.

When the months of November or December seem like midyear; or when last weekend just seem like yesterday while tomorrow is the next weekend already; When you feel that your two month baby in no time started going to kindergarten; when your bank account balance suddenly seems too less than you expected it to be; when your birthday this year seems to have come too soon; or when everything seems to be going wrong; or when we don’t seem to have any clue of what are the start and end points of something; each of these is an illusion caused due to lack of enough pauses.

Pause is that which reveals the grey areas, which makes the contrasts more visible, which wakes one up or puts one to sleep. It is a stepping stone for one who wants to rise up and that which holds one from falling down. It is a time for review. It is a time for a new plan. It is the time to see where we came from and the time to decide the direction in which to proceed.  Pause is a time when one should go deaf only to hear one’s self more clearly. It is a moment where one should go blind only to enable oneself to see new things or to see same things differently. Pause is a pause to past regrets and a stop to future regrets.

We might not always need new rules or new laws for old and new problems. What if in the first place we didn’t identify the problems rightly? We need not always run to reach our goal. What if our goal itself is wrong? We need not always follow someone just because there was only one track. What if it doesn’t take us anywhere? What if at any point the only way out is to pause? But I think we humans somehow do not have the skill to pause or at the least the ability to think of pausing. May be no one told us that to pause is an action in itself. Our failure to pause when the time is still ripe might never let us to take a pause even if the situation demands. Does this strike any bell? Don’t you think our problem of pollution and the lack of solutions for it is a consequence of our failure to pause?   

Do you think I am saying that we should put a stop to all the development and go back to the dark ages or that by pausing I mean inaction or idleness? No, not at all. Lighting a candle and then leaving it to fight with the wind before it gets blown off is stupidity. But taking a pause to make arrangements to protect the flame before lighting the candle is wisdom. We all read the ‘the hare and the tortoise’ story and we also know the moral by heart ‘slow and steady wins the race’ yet we almost always follow the hare. I wonder why !!! Should we mistake tortoise’s steadiness to be idleness or we should think that it kept gathering its strength for a longer journey ahead by taking enough pauses?

In a world where uncertainty is the only guarantee, where the unknown unknowns (in the words of Donald Rumsfeld) rule over the known knowns, sometimes a pause is a better solution than any action. As the world is getting smaller and smaller the butterfly effect will be more intense. I can pin point instances from our day to day lives to world politics where a simple pause would have made our personal and universal worlds a better place to live in. But I don’t want to. 

I only want to highlight the fact that a pause could be as small as taking time off a busy schedule to take a deep breath or as striking as questioning something before believing. It could be an effort to break a ritual or a stigma to offer alternative narratives or it could be as big a deal as taking a pause before starting a war. I just want to inculcate the idea of pause, emphasize its need and power. Let us take a pause and see !!!