There is something about forced pauses. They are frustrating, unwelcome, and annoying. They disrupt our rhythms forcing us into a different one. Often they come with pain or discomfort of some sort. And they can come in many different forms. From traffic lights, redundancies, illness, or many other things. For many of us over the past couple of years, it has been COVID and all its accompaniments.

Sometimes within the pause, after the anger emotions, new insight arrives and even peace. However, this isn’t always the case and it can’t be explained away with trite sayings. And the weird thing is that sometimes it helps to actively ‘look for’ the new insight or peace, while other times the looking stops it from coming.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz