“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” – Annie Lamott
The light turns green, the white Honda Accord in front of me seems to sit even more motionless than it had been while the light was red. The longest three seconds of all time pass. Three seconds seems like a reasonable amount of time to let slip by before a short press on the horn is warranted right? Right before my impatience gets the best of me, the Honda’s wheels begin to turn, and my temper begins to recede.
Does the act of thinking really require so much pen clicking? Does the gap between the sound of the elevator getting to the floor you’re on, and the doors opening get longer and longer each year? How many swings of a hammer does it actually take to firmly send a nail into the wall? I have struggled with the continual and uncontrollable mental grind of relatively unimportant phenomena activating my impatience for the last three or four years.
I started really noticing these moments of restlessness only when I started my mindfulness path, I knew that it was somewhat of an issue before, but I always just assumed that it was part of who I was. After one particularly heated debate with my older brother about whether or not it was absolutely imperative that he scrapes the sides of his cereal bowl, I figured it was time to start looking into it.
As much as I would like to think each of these situations is some sort of huge conspiracy just to aggravate me, the reality is that these are moments that everyone finds themselves in throughout daily life, and it is I who happens to have a very negative answer when they happen to affect me.
All the time in the mindfulness discourse we hear about “Meeting this moment as a friend” or “opening your heart to every feeling” but if the mere experience of a kettle boiling for way too long (whatever that means) sends me into a downward spiralling trance of emotions, how can I stop and evaluate my feelings before that willingness to start yelling takes over? I needed a wall to stand in between me and my continual battle with these discomforts, so I went searching for something.
Renowned Mindfulness teacher Tara Brach talks extensively about this idea of using a “Pause” to start RESPONDING to moments of annoyance, pain or irritation, instead of REACTING to them. Brach speaks in her book “Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With The Heart Of A Buddha” about what her idea of The Pause is, describing it as a brief interruption, a short moment of ceasing engagement with any phenomena outside of yourself.
What this sounded like to me was essentially a tiny meditation, you can do at any time, any place, without feeling like you have to get out your candles and Buddha statue, or whatever gets you to that meditative state, statues and candles are just part of my process. This idea of Pausing, accepting and then responding seemed like a realistic habit to build into my day.
I researched these teachings more, the way it was described to me was enchanting. Just two or three deep, reflective, and meditative breaths can get you from a headspace full of unaware, unaccepting, and potentially problematic thoughts, to an open field beyond that maelstrom of impatience, where you can begin to accept the current situation and react to it from a completely different place in comparison to where your mind had started.
So there I was, with a potential answer to something that has eating up minutes and potentially hours of my day for at least the last couple years. All I had to do was implement it right away and I will never have to yell at my brother for loudly eating a bowl of cereal ever again. I learned quickly that establishing habits which are in direct contrast to our normal patterns of behaviour can take just a little longer than just one or two hyper-conscious mornings.
I feel as though we have all been in a similar position to the one I have described. Finding what you think might be an answer to a serious problem you have been having for quite a while now, and all you have to do is find a way to make it become a part of you? Yeah, not as easy as it sounds. Well, you might know that but I didn’t, and still don’t seem to have that down.
Recently, I found myself in one of those exact moments, my brother (he is a repeat offender) was drinking a can of soda just a little too loudly. The crack of the can opening, the initial rush of carbonation, glugging, glugging, glugging, I was about to let myself re-enter that maelstrom once again, and in the midst of my disorientation, I remembered:
“Oh, right, there’s that thing I’m supposed to do? What was it again? Pause? Breathe?”
I responded, I didn’t react. My reaction would have, without doubt, been to lambast him. My reaction after using “The Pause”? I got up, and left the room. Nobody got hurt or upset like usual, I didn’t have to sit with it, feeling like all my time spent meditating was for nothing for the next hour like I normally do. Using the Pause worked.
When we are not in those trances, those moments of confusion and impatience, we can create and leave land-marks, or lighthouses, that can show the way back to that field beyond those emotions that arise every time something “grinds your gears”.
Even though I find myself early on this path, it is admittedly liberating to know that one can transcend these moments that previously seemed so entrenched as reactions, that I couldn’t imagine ever being able to leave that aspect of my character behind.
We can find these fleeting seconds of time where we allow ourselves to give in, and when we find them, pause, and emerge with a more amiable or appropriate answer. Everyone we interact with can benefit from us taking the opportunity to pause and respond, not react.
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