While on a walk, my husband and I stopped to take a look at the view of the mountains we could catch between the trees and buildings nearby. On that particular day, the weather, the season, the lighting . . . all these details made that familiar view unique. We decided, in that moment, that we want to be “people who pause.”
My initial appellation for these teeny fuzzies I cannot seem to recall, but I think it was something like “fairy tails” or “fairy swirls.” Whatever it was, it used the word “fairy.” They just seem straight out of Narnia, don’t they?
I discovered them in a dried up stream bed in the Sandia mountains of New Mexico. (See what else I found in that stream bed in this earlier post.) I had never seen anything like them, that I could recall. They were simply magical. I couldn’t help but stop and marvel.
Delight.
Wonder.
These little wisps, like delicate little spiraled feathers, were patiently waiting to be carried forth on the wind. Though still, they seemed to giggle.
Whimsical little beings.
Simply delightful.
As a part of our conscious, intentional identity, pausing places value on being rather than just doing. To pause is to slow. It is to interrupt the ever-so-typical tyranny of the urgent.
Pausing challenges the notion of urgency. For when all of life is urgent we cannot pause.
When life next tempts to keep you blinkered to all that passes you by (or, rather, that you quickly pass by), what will you glimpse? What will you attend to? What will you notice?
Pausing takes courage. It may feel strange and unnatural at times, but this is largely because we are as yet unaccustomed to it. But there are not many things so worthy of becoming accustomed to.
May we become a people who pause. Who delight. Who simply be.
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