IS: The promise of the pause
Upcoming open events:
- Friday December 13 - Office Hours, holiday edition
- Saturday December 14 - Practice Dojo: Being With It All #5, final session!
IS Calls start at 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC). Community calls for Season 16 run every Sunday through December 22.
We've entered December and I can sense the turning of the year as it approaches. It's present in the seasonal decorating and preparations, the chill in the air, the post-thanksgiving school sprint to break, the daylight nadir of winter solstice, the holidays themselves. There's a particular slowing-down quality, most felt in the in-between time amidst Christmas and New Year's — a quality of the world wound down together in one pregnant pause, turning inward and taking a breath, before we launch into January with new resolutions and resolve.
How might you use or experience that societal pause this year? When we collectively pause from our work and turn down the noise, what might you hear or sense? There's something already there underneath, a humming — a soft, subtle sound usually overshadowed by the rhythmic engines of regular life. It's like when the factory abruptly shuts down and in the sudden silence you can notice the birds start to resume their singing. We tend to look toward family, toward gratitude and gifts, and toward spirituality and meaning-making.
What gifts is life already giving you, perhaps in the form of obstacles or challenges? What gifts does life want to give through you, through your unique combination of talents and relationships? You can't summon these answers on demand, but perhaps you and I could listen together during this holiday season for the subtle pull. Listen for the whisper on the wind, the desire that lives in your heart, the fire that smolders in your belly.
Promise me one thing, if you hear that call in the pause: that you will try to remember. Speak it to yourself, out loud, what you've sensed and that you have received it. Write yourself a sticky note, and put it in your path, so that when the engine restarts in the new year, you are reminded to attend to the sweet song underneath the cacophony. If it keeps that foothold in your awareness, it will unfold itself into aliveness.
Cheers,
James