Pause

During the times I feel stretched too thin, my mind is constantly engaged without being fully present. I am present to what I am doing but not to the space that holds me in that moment. I don’t notice that the color of the sky has changed or that the wind has picked up. Or how much my mind and body feel taxed and pushed to their limits. Can the state of being in the present be split into two, between an awareness of what I am doing and my immediate surroundings? I wonder if that is  just a splitting of my attention where I am not truly present. Or is it rest?

When my mind is constantly engaged in what I am doing, what appears to be focus is actually movement. A movement too fast and varied that I never catch up. There is no pause. However, a pause is where we experience the present.. The negative spaces in paintings, the spaces that adjoin the curves of sculptures, the sustained rests between notes and phrases in music, the quietness before the next movement—those spatial and temporal pauses make us come back to ourselves and experience our relationship to the piece before we can begin to experience the piece itself. It makes the relationship possible. We come back to ourselves in order to truly engage in what we see. 

I think about paring back. Not only in what I do but how I do them. I think about creating negative spaces in the way I engage. An emptiness that allows me to breathe and come back to myself, a certain leisurely state that creates a distance between myself and my mind—a moment of rest. A springboard for doing fully.