The Moments in Between III

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The Pause Before Choosing

Moments claw for attention and still they slip through our fingers.

I know I’m making this all sound like it should be rote for us because we’re all really superhuman beings. That we all obviously ought to be doing this from birth. The tool is there. Why not use it? Well, the simple answer is, who’s there to make you follow through? Aha, you say. You knew there would be a catch. There’s no way the ‘pause‘ will just happen for you now that you’ve heard about it.

If you weren’t a graced adept with this gift at birth; you will need to work on it to employ it. Again, this is something that occurs on the subconscious level – an early warning system of sorts…if you let it. You gotta work it, though, as we say in the program. 🤭

“How do we control that? How to we take advantage of it? If it’s so fleeting, what’s to control it in the first place?” all legitimate questions. The fact is, it’s there already. The tool is ours. It’s called reason and it’s a quick little bugger once you let it in. Reason, once enabled, can make faster-than-light decisions like it was born to it. We’ve all experienced it. Reason is that voice that tells you, no, it’s still too hot to handle. Impulse is the antithesis of reason, and tells you, “You can do it.” regardless the cost.

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles in the body before a real choice is made. It isn’t the kind of decision point people often talk about. It isn’t the crossroads, or the cliff edge, and it’s not the moment of triumph or collapse. I refer to that quieter terrain that comes just before all of that. As I’ve called it before, the pause, the breath, the moment. The external stillness that isn’t still at all inside. That in-between nanosecond dividing thought from action.

I think a lot of us rush past it. Mistaking it for indecision never giving it time to take purchase. We try to fill it with noise, advice, distraction, or motion for motion’s sake, foregoing or evading real impactful thought. It’s the old, “Ready, fire, aim” syndrome.

Well, think about this for a sec. Ignoring those inner signals might just cause us to crash and burn. Subconsciously we knew it was a poor choice to ignore ‘that voice’, but we pushed through anyway without thought because that’s what we wanted to do, or everyone else was doing, or we thought just once wont’ hurt, etc. We had already justified our action, and we blew over the moment.

If we give in to our impulses or if we never learned to take that breathe first, we’ve no more than a fifty-fifty chance of doing right.

The pause before choosing is its own landscape, and if you allow yourself to be aware of these moments, you start to feel its contours. You start to understand that this is where the real work happens. The tool begins to work for you, and it does so automatically.

I know! I keep harping on the same points. This whole series is about taking the time to let your strongest tool work just a bit before the rest of you follows. You know I’m talking about your brain and its infinite and nearly almighty power to choose and, preloaded with knowledge and common sense, the process is instant.

Choosing, in this sense, isn’t just about picking a direction. It’s about acknowledging the weight of what you’re carrying into those moments – uncertainty, fear, your past, hopes you’ve outgrown, ones you’re still trying to believe. The pause gives you space to sift through all of that and notice what rises and what falls away, without detouring from your path and little to no effect on how long it took.

That’s right! You might not believe this, but it won’t slow you down, unless there’s a need to. You’ll just slide through on a frictionless conveyance to the next right thing because no internals alarms were set off. That’s what it comes down to. Do the next right thing, always. As long as you don’t lie to yourself, you can’t go wrong. You know what’s right. That takes no time at all to acknowledge.

You may feel that while in the moment, time stretches. I don’t mean some sci-fi time-dilating spacey razzmatazz stuff. No! But for the briefest of moments, there is a clarity of choice. That voice didn’t get triggered. The all-clear sounds. You move through to the next right thing.

It’s almost straight-line logic occurring at the speed of light. The world narrows to what’s essential (right). You feel the tug of the familiar on one side, the pull of the unknown on the other. You also feel the echo of past choices that shaped you, and others that cost you. Ones that saved you without you realizing it at the time. And somewhere in that heartbeat of a process, you sense a direction that feels true, even when it’s obviously not the easiest one. You know what the next right thing is and you do it.

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The pause before choosing isn’t about waiting for certainty. Certainty is a luxury, and most of the time it’s an illusion.

What you’re really waiting for is alignment. That internal shift where the mind stops arguing with the heart, where the body stops bracing for movement. Something inside you finally says, yes, this is the direction that feels like mine…and you go there.

And it took less time than it would take to say, “wait”.

We hope that alignment always comes quickly. But when the process does stretch out; that breeds hesitation, which can be healthy too. Alignment can arrive in pieces. A bit of Deja Vous interrupts the flow – a feeling here, a memory there, a quiet knowing that grows louder each time you return to it. But it always comes, if you give it room. We learn to embrace those moments and react to them instead of the initial impulse to leap.

The pause may, if the signals are true, result in a delay that allows for more thought and perhaps a better decision. In that case, who cares how long the delay is? That micron long moment of automatic reasoning saved you from a loss caused by an impulsive knee-jerk reaction. You did the right thing instead. That’s heroic stuff. That’s living ‘in the moment’.

And that’s the real purpose of the pause: to give yourself room. Room to breathe and let the truth surface without forcing it. When the choice finally arrives, and you step forward to commit; when you say the words or take the action, it feels less like a leap and more like a natural next step that began long before you recognized it. The pause didn’t delay you. It allowed for analysis and prepared you. And when you look back later, you’ll realize that the moments before choosing were just as important as the choice itself. Maybe more so.

In the moments before action, the in-between, where you met yourself honestly; that’s where you listened. Where you became ready for what came next. That’s a proper use of the moments we are gifted. It’s absolutely okay to stop and smell the roses. It might one day become imperative.

Just let yourself seize the ‘moment’ first.

Popi loves ya…

The next article in the series: The Moments in Between IV

The Power or ‘Thought before Action‘

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NOTE: All photos are Mine, from the Public Domain, or AI Generated from my prompts. I’ll usually let you know which is which. Sometimes I forget.