Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about pauses. The kind that don’t come with a clear expiration date. The kind that stretch out longer than you intended, until suddenly, you realize you’ve been living in one.
I’ve stepped back from social media, from the constant stream of updates and opinions and reactions, quietly slipping away, noticing how different the world feels when it’s not being narrated back to me in real time with algorithms.
I thought I’d feel restless. Instead, I feel... regulated. More in control of my own thoughts, my own emotions.
I get to choose what I let in.
I don’t have to react to everything. And that, as it turns out, is a kind of freedom I had forgotten existed.
Of course, there’s a strangeness to this kind of stillness. A feeling like I should be using it for something—figuring things out, making sense of what comes next. Instead, I’ve just been here, sitting in the pause, trying to see what it has to teach me.
A few days ago, I started reading Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, a four-week program on thinking more clearly, seeing things as they are, and learning how to let go of the self-imposed urgency that runs most of our lives. He writes:
"Many of the things that make life feel unbearable aren’t the things themselves, but our resistance to them."
That stuck with me. Because, lately, I’ve been noticing all the ways I make things harder than they need to be. The way I overthink, overanalyze, add unnecessary weight to things that could be light.
Tim Ferriss has this journaling prompt: What would this look like if it were easy? I’ve started using it like a mantra. When I wake up feeling behind on everything. When I catch myself spiraling over something that doesn’t really matter.
When I feel the impulse to make a simple task unnecessarily complicated. I remind myself: I choose to live in Easy World, where everything is easy.
And maybe it sounds ridiculous, but it helps. It reminds me that not everything has to be a struggle. That sometimes, the best thing I can do is step back, breathe, and stop making things harder than they need to be.
Virginia Woolf once wrote:
"No need to be anybody but oneself.”
I’ve been trying to hold on to that too. The idea that I don’t have to constantly push, strive, or define myself in ways that make sense to other people. I can just be here, in the middle of this pause, without needing to justify it.
Joan Didion once wrote in her diary:
"I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."
I think about that a lot. How we are always slipping in and out of different versions of ourselves. How sometimes, the person we used to be doesn’t feel like someone we even recognize anymore.
I wonder if that’s what this pause is for—to make peace with the people I’ve already lost touch with. To decide who I want to become next.
And Nietzsche once said:
"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
Maybe that’s what a pause is, too—a kind of slow, aimless wandering through thoughts we haven’t fully formed yet. A space where we can let ideas unfold naturally, instead of forcing them into neat conclusions.
I don’t have the answers yet. Maybe I don’t need them. Maybe all I need to do is sit in this pause a little longer, resist the urge to fill it, and see what happens.
And maybe you’re in a pause too. Maybe you feel like you’re in between things, unsure of what happens next. If so, here’s something to try: next time you catch yourself making things unnecessarily difficult, ask yourself—what would this look like if it were easy?
See what changes. See what stays the same. Either way, it’s okay. There’s time.