The Art of Pausing - My Experience

Regular practices – daily, weekly, just regularly – are foundational for profound living. Sure, it may just so happen that one is happy, healthy, and wise, but the odds are much better, and the science is demonstrating this, that people who have regular practices of generosity, gratitude, humility, and contemplation (or mindfulness if you prefer) and other virtues/disciplines are more likely to be…well…happy, healthy, and wiser than ungenerous, ungrateful, prideful people.

Developing these kinds of practices has been and will continue to be a theme here at Profound Living.

In January, I began reading a fabulous little book called The Art Of Pausing , by Judith Valente, Br. Paul Quenon, and Michael Bever, which is all about reading and writing a haiku each day. (For more about haiku see below.)

I love this book.

I am going to immediately read it again.

For several reasons. The first is the theme of the book – pausing. In our rumble, tumble, stumble, crumble world these days – in my world, anyway – it is important to develop ways to step back, to take a breath, to put things into perspective, and to just “be”. To pay attention to now. Right now. This book is all about, after all, the art of pausing.

Second is the way the book is organized, which is perfect for developing a daily practice. The book “seeks to illuminate of the 99 names of God referred to in sacred texts” (p. 11). When I read that I thought, “How marvelous!” The authors present a haiku for each of those names and a narrative or photo which supports and enriches it. Readers are encouraged to "'write a holy sentence everyday' in silence, for silence is the door to contemplation". That’s how and why I got started.

I began reading one of their haikus every day, starting on January 21, 2019, and nearly every day thereafter I wrote one and sometimes two of my own haikus. When I finished the book this morning (May 26, 2019) I had written 119. I don’t ever judge what I came up with, their quality, their trite or profoundness, or how competently they are written. They may mean nothing to someone else. The practice of writing a haiku a day has become an important part of what I do.

Third, the theme of the book is pausing, but the way they put it all together is much more than that. These three combined – pausing, focusing on a sacred topic, and then writing – is now a spiritual discipline for me. My plan is to start tomorrow and to read the book again, continuing to write a haiku a day for as long as this practice remains meaningful to me. That could be a long time. The wonderful narratives authors Valente, Quenon, and Bever have written are short, just one or two or three paragraphs, but they are written so engagingly and so intimately that I have been floored at times. They share personal experience – stories – and so much more that I didn’t know before. That I hadn't even heard of before.

I need to read them all again. I need to let them soak in some more.

I’ve used this exercise to work on improving the ways I can express what sometimes is hard or impossible to express in words. I've had to learn new words, use words better, cut out the extraneous as best I can. These haikus sometimes serve as writing prompts for other projects I’m pursuing, but mostly these, each day, engage me in taking a fully attentive look at something and then figuring out how to express that something very clearly and very compactly. The exercise seems all about getting to the essence of experience in three lines and 17 syllables.

I am such a beginner.

I will stop here. I just wanted to give a shout out to the Art of Pausing folks. Thanks for the encouragement, support, and the scaffolding you've shared with me and so many others, so we can try out something new, meaningful, attainable, and actionable. Something that, like every practice practiced over time, will make continually deepening a part of my life.

Here are the last few I wrote.

If you are interested in this poetic form, I highly recommend the work in The Art of Pausing . It is so, so good.

What Is Haiku?

Three lines. Five syllables the first line. Seven syllables the second line. Five syllables the third line. They aren't supposed to rhyme, but of course why have rules if you can't break them once in a while.

More about haiku here.

It can be so beautiful. Take a look at some here.

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