Space. Pause. Rest. Breathe.
All of these words are invitations to help us be our authentic selves. They help us savour the blessings and gifts of the moment. Think of the moment between finishing the Happy Birthday song and blowing out the candles. It is full of anticipation, of possibility, of promise and of palpable joy.
Space, Pause. Rest. Breathe. Are also the words used to help us manage the most upsetting, awful, hard moments of life where all we want to do is react, fight, yell, leave. Think of the moment you watch a plan, a commitment, an item, a heartbeat be broken by someone’s carelessness and how in that moment there is a cascade of fear and anger. Do you let that out or do you watch it rise in you instead without reacting to it.
Consider this quote from Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
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.”
Remember that you choose to be aware or not of what is happening in and around you. And the more you choose to notice how you are doing, you can choose to respond and not react.
This is only possible with Space. Pause. Rest. Breathe.
