The Great Pause

Have you ever experienced a great pause in your life? A time in your life when things outside your control affected you, your business, your family, your friends and your very way of life; forcing you to pause for a significant amount of time, months or even years. This could be one event or a series of events.

My great pause came in the form of a traumatic injury.

An injury that forced me to slow way down to heal and, in that healing, there was a good deal of reflection. Maybe this is the definition of a great pause, a time in one’s life where a slowness is required to move through the event, causing reflection and realignment of activities and priority. A time that as you are slowed in your great pause you watch others move quickly past you. It seems that they have never had a great pause or maybe they have and they know the secret already.

When an event happens that forces you to reevaluate everything, you realize that life holds a secret and it took this event to make you stop, slow down, reevaluate, realign, stop doing certain tasks, start doing other tasks, and pivot. Your work and life are turned upside down to reveal the secret. When you know the secret, you become part of a group of people you never thought to be a part of, however, you are glad to be a part of this elite group, finding you are not alone.

Isolation is the worst part of a great pause, though it is not the secret.

Watching the people in your life either step up or not, burrows a hole deep within your heart. When a great pause happens to you all your relationships will be challenged and some relationships will not survive. You will want to ignore the reality to save certain relationships. You soon realize you cannot save some of the relationships. Still, this is not the secret.

As your world continues to crumble around you, time moves on and people move on. Whatever created your great pause becomes a fleeting thought for others as time passes. You feel all the pain of the event as real as the first moment it happened. Even if your great pause was not a physical trauma, the emotional pain, the physical pain, the mental anguish, the gut-wrenching nausea, and the long-term effects on your entire body plague you daily. You have to learn to deal with the sting of people no longer checking on you. You are no longer at the forefront of other’s minds unless they know the secret.

People’s lives continue to move forward quickly and you feel left behind. Left behind to deal with your thoughts, your fears, and your insecurities. You realize that life moves on with or without you. You begin to wonder does it make a difference? Do you make a difference? Would it make a difference if...?

“Shockingly, this isn’t the secret either, although this is why recognizing and normalizing mental health struggles is so very important. When a great pause happens in someone’s life their mental well being comes under attack from all directions.”

Do you know the secret? The secret of the great pause. The secret that no one wants to know, however, once you know it you can never unlearn it, unsee it and life will never be the same. What is that secret you ask? Control, for the most part, is an illusion. When a great pause comes control seems to be the first thing to go. Once the great pause starts, we clammer, climb and strive for control to never have it in our grasp again. It feels hopeless, you feel helpless, and the longer your personal great pause continues the harder it gets. In the beginning of your great pause, it isn’t as heavy, as people are interested in helping and checking on you. Over time though, the interest others have in how you are doing fades away. The feelings of hopelessness and helplessness grow stronger as others fade away to give you your space. The grieving process is in full swing and it becomes even more clear, control as we know it is an illusion.

If we fully controlled anything our great pause would not have occurred. We would have seen it coming and adjusted to make it more comfortable for ourselves and those around us. We would have taken the precautions and the steps to not make life hard as each great pause is hard. Control is the thing we want the most and what we have the least. All we do have is time reminding us of our lack of control, repeatedly.

Even though the secret of a great pause is that control is an illusion, it does shine a light on the things we do control. We control our thoughts, our actions and our time. That is it. Our ability to control what happens to us is boiled down to those three things. Even still though, our personal great pause may even have us question if we control our actions. I know mine did. My injury was not my fault. I was not doing anything dangerous or out of the ordinary. I was walking. Just walking. Was I wrong to be walking where I was? My action was walking, the circumstance was unforeseen and dangerous. I presumed safety. As for my time, I chose to be where I was and when I was there. I had control of my thoughts, actions and time… or did I? When facing the idea that control is an illusion, I began to question what I have held true for a long time. This is the battle I choose every time, we control three things our thoughts, our actions, and our time, nothing else.

I began to doubt these things after my injury as it looked like, felt like, and seemed like there was nothing that could have been done to take control and avoid the situation. I then learned the next secret that only a great pause can bring a person. Time and unforeseen circumstance are life’s trump card. Time, as in time goes on no matter what, not the time that you control by choosing when to do something or take meetings. Life has the upper hand through time and unforeseen circumstance. So, no matter how much I leveraged my thoughts, my actions and my time life was going to happen for me and not to me.

This allowed me to understand how I do control only these three things. The success or failure of my great pause would rely on my thoughts, my actions, and my time. What I think about the situation and how I apply those thoughts into my life became important. What actions I took from those thoughts and how I acted upon them in my daily life became pivotal in my ability to move through my great pause. How I used my time, both in my personal life to heal, rest, rejuvenate and in my business to plan, scale and grow became crucial to being able to continue my mission in life. This situation further solidified what I am here to do and who I am here to serve.

Have you experienced a great pause? Do you know the secret? Are you moving quickly forward leaving others behind?