In the Pause: Come take a walk with me
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Last week, I posted some thoughts to my Instagram stories that I want to capture here—and I want to expand on those as well.
There are people who thrive on social interaction, on crowds, on constant information and stimulation. I thrive in the quiet. I thrive out-of-doors. I thrive when I am in motion—but gentle motion, like a brisk walk with lots of permission to stop and take photos or smell lilacs. When Beautycounter shut down, we all listened to the same message. Some people heard a call to action. I heard only the word “pause.” In hindsight, I should have just sat with my word—the word that most stood out to me. I should have listened to the word.
Instead, I tried fix everything all at once. I saw a need. What will people do? How can I serve the people I’ve loved these last three years and find something else that encourages self-care so well? How can I replace lost income? I heard so many messages, read so much information, received and opened and examined the contents of so many boxes! It was all happening so fast—so many moving pieces and people. But I wanted time: time to thoughtfully order products, time to receive them, time to test them and to see how they fared over time. I could not keep up.
And here, despite listening so very carefully to so many people in the “health space,” despite being so determined to find only the cleanest of clean products from household cleaners to skin care to nutritionals, I found myself early Tuesday morning staring at a smoothie made of the stuff of anaphylaxis. Thoroughly tired and still hurrying, I had made it for myself from products sent to me by a new company. I perused the labels as I prepared to sip. Every single packet—every flavor—has banana powder in it. When I was 10, I ate a banana and ended up in the ER becoming acquainted with epinephrine shots. How did I miss the banana? Even though it seems objectively good, this product line is not for me. I am limited by my allergy, something outside my control. Today, I am grateful for the Gift of Limitations (both the book and my actual limitations). I’m grateful to have hit a wall, to be hemmed in, to be able to choose to embrace the pause however uncomfortable it may be at first.
There has been such a fruitful conversation lately about what phone use and social media is doing to our kids. That generation doesn’t have a monopoly on anxiety. The barrage of information and the “crowds” are overwhelming. Grown-up brains are not immune. They can grow and change, too. Neuroplasticity is not just for the young. My brain is tired. My children are watching. For a long time now, I have felt like I cannot keep up with the speed of social media. I was feeling overwhelmed all the time, completely sucked dry of any creativity or ease. And the whole Beautycounter plight accelerated everything to a speed that made me physically ill.
The fences went up. Whether I wanted to keep trying to keep up or not, I could not. Body, mind, and soul—all three begged me to please hear and heed the call to pause.
Like every other person who posts anything to the internet, I only expose a fraction of my life. This is not nefarious. It is only what is possible. No one can reveal her whole self, and some of us have learned just how much is good. We likely learned it the hard way. My life is full of challenges that limit my time to write, my time to research, my time to market, my time to create. And more often than I would care to admit, these challenges have frustrated me to tears. What could I be or do if only I were not limited by the realities of the impediments to my larger-than-possible imagination? This whole Beautycounter crisis? It amplified for me the incessant noise already creating a dissonant cacophony in my head. I had no choice but to see that there was indeed a hedge around me, separating what was truly possible for me and grandiose ideas that were not. I cannot keep pace with the social life of the internet and remain healthy.
And yet.
Writing (and sharing what I write with safe people) is one of
the most life-giving things I can do.
I know this about myself.
As I walked in the early morning, I tried to puzzle this all out: how to hold on to the good, the true, and the beautiful here inside my fenceline? How to inhale deeply and also exhale completely? How to be authentic and life-giving and healthy and whole? How to practice self-care that cannot be packaged in a pretty pink jar or foil lined bag? How to fully lean in to who I was created to be, at peace with all the other iterations not available to me?
Can I do that? In a world full of opportunity, where information is so easily accessible, can I limit myself because it’s in the limits that I will truly flourish? What does that look like? If that is genuine care for myself, how do I open that bottle?
I intend to find out.
I sat to put this post together and I scrolled through my camera roll, looking at the images I’d taken on my many sunrise walks in the last week. I live in an extraordinary neighborhood. Around every corner in the early spring mornings, the air smells like lilacs and the landscape is one breathtaking shot after another. Perusing photos with this post in mind, I noticed something: nearly every picture had a fence in it. Some were picket fences. Some were iron fences. Some were old stone walls. In every picture, the fences added dimension and interest and beauty. The fences were beautiful!
Could I look at fences differently, henceforth? Could I see them not as objects of restraint or prohibition or restriction, but as the beautiful boundary inside which to bloom? Could the fence be beautiful and the space inside the fence also be beautiful? There is ample room here inside the fenceline. There is a lot of good here. Let’s see what will grow.
About something that Viktor Frankl wrote, Stephen Covey said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
We have to pause in order to take up that space between stimulus and response. We have to be in the space for a bit. If we don’t—if we just keep responding without pausing—we relinquish our freedom and our ability to truly grow.
The word is pause.
I hear it now.
I’m listening.
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