Press Pause

“The days are long and the years are short.”

How is it that another year has flown by and yet at the same time, we are often struggling to get through the day? How are the kids in our lives growing up so fast? How are we fighting wrinkles already? How are the times changing so fast while the clock often slows to a lazy crawl? How can we reconcile these two seemingly opposite realities?

There has been a lot of talk about being in the present moment (this of course is a huge part of yoga practice), and I never really understood the way that this idea fits in and affects our lives until I started thinking about it in terms of the passage of time. Pressing pause on a regular basis, even when you aren’t sitting on a yoga mat, enables us to grasp and hold on to time instead of letting it float away forever. Pressing pause enables us to remember not just the really awesome and significant moments (which we remember really easily) but also the relatively insignificant, simpler, smaller moments...the ones that seem like ones we might want to forget in the moment but often turn out to be more significant in the long run.

I have easily gone for weeks without taking the time to actually acknowledge the current moment I’m in, and then, whether some days are challenge to get through or end up feeling mundane, a month has gone by and I have no idea what I did a week ago. Whether we fly or crawl through our long days, we often just try to get through them instead of being OK with being in them.

If we can press pause a few times a day to acknowledge where we are, we can better justify the passage of time because we’ll end up with a series of moments we consciously recognized and stored in our memory bank. In other words, all this time went by, but all of these moments were recognized and mentally noted. It’s not enough to live the moments; you need to consciously recognize that you are living these moments, sort of like the feeling of a lucid dream.

What day is it? Where are you? What do you see? What are you doing? How do you feel? Why? All those feelings, whether positive or negative, are so important to recognize. It’s allowing you to be honest with yourself.

Today is Monday, December 31, 2018 (wait...is it actually Monday?), it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m reflecting on the past year. I slept in way too long, but I’m not going to feel guilty about it because it felt really nice. Right now, I’m writing something, my neck hurts and my kids are playing upstairs.

There. To some degree, I’ve paused and noted where I am in the day. I’ve landed in the moment instead of floating above and through it, whereby I’d probably be unable to go back a week from now and remember any specific details or feelings about the day.  

I have tried to do this regularly for a lot of this past year, and I can honestly report that when I spend a month or two straight just pausing a few times a day to recognize the date, time and place—my physical and emotional setting—the time doesn’t seem to fly as fast and instead of feeling like I have let go of a few weeks instead of being in them, I can look back and feel like the actual passage of time aligns with my feeling about that passage of time. They match up more like two parallel lines than one scribble and nothing more.

Here and there, I’ve managed to write things down in a journal daily, which is an even better way to document the pressing of pause and remember the days, but if that’s not your thing, just know that merely stopping to just be here will make a huge difference.

Press pause today, tomorrow and the next day. Once it becomes a habit, you’ll feel calmer and more refreshed. The days may always feel longer than the years in general, but you can bridge the gap between the two by landing in the present moment, daily, to take stock of where you are and drop a pin in that location. Perhaps you’ll be better able to reflect on the path you took to get here and see how many turns you made, how many ups and downs you navigated, to help reconcile the amount of time it actually took to get here.

I hope you have a very Happy New Year and a very awesome 2019!