Nobody likes to feel bored while waiting. Life, however, is full of such pauses. These pauses are the requisite moments in between otherwise purposeful activities during which you can’t do anything but wait for an event to end or begin. Everybody has such moments: waiting in line at a store, waiting at a traffic light, waiting for the bus, waiting for your baby to finish nursing for the eighth time in a day. When we’re subject to the same monotonous activity every day, these moments can feel exceedingly dull. It would be much nicer if life was one long sequence of meaningful moments without such pauses. However, we can enrich our everyday experience by intentionally choosing how to make those pauses meaningful. Once you have a constructive plan for what to do while you’re waiting, you can change an otherwise tedious situation into something meaningful.
Why We’re Uncomfortable with Pauses
Pauses are a part of life. There is no way around it: we are all subject to have to wait for things every day. This is easier for some than for others, but the majority of people living a modern lifestyle may have more trouble than not. We are accustomed to a fast-paced lifestyle and sort of forced into it from a young age. Our society is obsessed with speed and caffeine. It’s no wonder there is a huge market right now for mindfulness tools and meditation advice. Everyone’s overly anxious and it’s no wonder.
So while some people have artfully mastered living through life’s pauses with ease, many others in today’s modern society struggle with that. It’s because we are trained to be productive, all the time. We don’t want to waste time, our most precious commodity. Waiting is like torture, especially when there’s nothing productive that we can accomplish in the meantime. Because these pauses don’t include larger blocks of time during which you can get into a good work groove or actually accomplish something. These pauses are the shorter blocks of time during which there’s no way you could expend the amount of focus and concentration necessary to accomplish a task you really need to do. You’re either in the wrong place or you don’t have a conducive environment or tools at your disposal.
The Typical Ways We Fill in the Pauses
We long for meaning because we’re human. So when we’re bombarded every day with multiple times that we have to wait for something but we can’t do anything worthwhile during that time, these pauses offer us very little meaning. To stave off feeling painfully bored, most of us turn to mindless activities like scrolling through social media on our phones. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this, but the key is to ask yourself how you feel afterwards. Is your mood improved after bumbling around on your phone, or do you feel a little mentally drained? If you feel anything less than good, then mindless social media scrolling is not what to do while you’re waiting. Yet, you ask, what else is there to do?
1. What to Do While You’re Waiting: Practice Gratitude
Practicing gratitude may sound cliché, but many simple truths do. And even though there may be plenty for which you’re understandably not grateful (life is full of tragedy and frustrations), conjure up that for which you are grateful. If you live somewhere with relatively peaceful national stability and you aren’t experiencing a war, be grateful for that. Sadly, so many places experience the brutality of violent attacks that leave children and families wounded, killed or misplaced. People live through unacceptable tragedies all the time. Living in a war-free country is a right everyone should have, but not everyone does. Therefore, we can always be grateful when we and our families can live safely and peacefully. Aside from that, having basic needs met are also wonderful things for which to be grateful. As are your own faculties – the ability to see, hear, move, and think clearly. Not everyone is that lucky!
2. What to Do While You’re Waiting: Visualize Affirmations
Affirmations are truths that you intentionally instill in your mind. They’re generally positive truths that we want to believe but our subconscious compels us otherwise. People use affirmations to re-train their thoughts toward a more positive and hopeful mindset. It can help to focus on one specific affirmation that you need to embrace and make a point to think about it whenever you have an opportunity. Visualizing yourself embodying such affirmations is incredibly helpful and can help transform your pauses into fruitful moments. Visualize the traits you want to employ. Visualize yourself as the holistically health person you want to be all of the time. This is also a perfect opportunity to use healing color visualization. The more mental space we give to our dreams, the more they manifest. Make an effort to focus on an affirmation every day during your pauses.
3. What to Do While You’re Waiting: Pray
Whatever or whoever you believe in, whatever your religion, you can always pray during pauses. If you don’t believe in an external source of power, praying includes discussing your hopes and dreams with yourself. Think of it as a self-pep talk. We all need someone to listen to our hopes and fears, and we all need to talk through them. It is healthy and productive to have these talks with yourself in your mind to work through things. And if you believe in God or any external source, then use your pauses to pray. Know that you’re heard and understood. In fact, for some people, pauses may be the only time they do this. Don’t miss an opportunity to spiritually connect and reflect. Simply feeling heard can lift your spirits.
4. What to Do While You’re Waiting: Ask Yourself Questions You Want to Solve
I learned something very interesting while going through a helpful healing program. Whenever we ask ourselves a question, our subconscious can’t help but try to figure out the answer. Whatever we focus on and ask ourselves can be fodder for behind-the-scenes subconscious work. So if you are struggling with a problem for which you just don’t understand a viable solution, use the pauses to focus on that. Ask yourself, How can I change the way I react to this person? or What would it take to reach this goal? and so on. You won’t immediately come up with a solution in our conscious mind, but your subconscious will take this question and work it out in the meantime. Stay in tune with your intuition and pay attention to what you come up with! You may surprise yourself with how clever you truly can be.
5. What to Do While You’re Waiting: Brainstorm
Exercise your creativity by using your pauses to brainstorm ideas. This is different than the above point, which involves your subconscious. Brainstorming is using your conscious mind to run through different possibilities for whatever situation at hand. Maybe there’s an issue at work that you need to think through. Sometimes, a change of environment helps you consider different angles. Use your pauses to help yourself out! Maybe you want to improve something at home. While going through the rest of your day’s meaningful activities, your pauses are the best time to give mental space to things you need some time to try and figure out.
6. What to Do While You’re Waiting: Stretch and Take Deep Breaths
Deep breathing is a great way to calm yourself. It serves you well by supplying extra oxygen to your body. Stretching not only feels great but also supplies more oxygen to your body. When you feel mentally frazzled and aren’t up for thinking about much of anything, give your mind a rest and stretch your body. Take deep breaths. Stretch your mouth and facial muscles. You probably won’t be in a physical position to do much else, but these are great tools for calming the nerves.
Life’s Longer Pauses
We all experience everyday pauses. However, pauses aren’t only the minutes-length ellipses between day-to-day events. They also include much longer periods of time that we may reflect on as ‘pauses’. Think of a major injury and the weeks required to stay in bed and recover. Most people get bored of that rather quickly.
Anything that feels to you as though it’s ‘interrupting’ your life’s course or whatever your dreams are can feel like a giant pause (coronavirus, anyone?). What constitutes this will vary from person to person, depending on the circumstances. Sadly, many people feel as though their job is one giant pause inhibiting them from spending their time in a way that’s truly meaningful to them. Life is complicated and it isn’t always financially feasible to secure a job that truly feels meant to be. While it’s possible, getting to that point is not always clear or easy.
One person’s pause will be another person’s dream come true. One person may feel that the entire experience of living in the suburbs and raising children in conventional modern lifestyle (because that is the most affordable and feasible path) is one giant pause between more exciting periods of their life: the spontaneous excitement and events of their pre-child days, and the next phase of life they plan to embrace after children are grown and on their own. (In other words, the entire phase of caring for minors in between periods of life in which one’s only responsibility is oneself is like a pause in life’s adventures.) Another person may embrace the exact same experience of living in the suburbs and raising children as an adventure every day, in the most fulfilling way. It really depends on each individual, their personality and deep needs, and what fulfills them in life.
Living Through a Longer Pause with Grace
These larger, years-long pauses require even more intention and devotion. Because just ‘getting through the time’ is the opposite of living mindfully in the moment. The antidote to discontent is gratitude alongside hopefulness. It does not mean resignation or abandoning dreams, but rather embracing present blessings and choosing to make the most out of every moment no matter how contrary it is to deeper desires. After all, blessings are often not seen as such until long before they’ve passed by. And how sad to not enjoy them in the present! In addition, we don’t need to succumb to all life stage expectations identically. There is always room to carve out your own ideal reality in the present.
Living life contentedly is like walking a fine line between gratitude for and enjoyment of what you have while also holding inner space and hope for what you want. Always aim for your true desires, but don’t miss the present blessings. When you’re in the throes of what feels like a longer pause, employ all of the above mental exercises during your daily pauses: practice gratitude, visualize affirmations, pray, ask yourself questions, brainstorm, and practice stretching/deep breathing. Giving mental space to these practices will serve you well, both on a daily basis and in the long run.
Use Pauses as an Opportunity to Enrich Your Life
The bottom line on how you spend your pauses is to consider what makes you feel best. If you are conversing with others via a messaging app or social media in a wholesome way that makes you feel good about yourself and about life, then that is a good use of your pause time. If whatever you are currently doing leaves you feeling discontent or troubled, it’s time to shift gears and implement one (or more) of the above alternatives. When considering what to do while you’re waiting, ask yourself whether it enriches your life or lessens your morale. Choose to enrich your life by intentionally filling in the pauses with wholesome and beneficial thoughts and actions.