March 2026 | A Graceful Pause
February 28, 2026
In physics, momentum is the amount of motion an object experiences. In day-to-day life, we speak about momentum as the thing that continues to propel us forward. It’s often seen as the benefit we gain after doing the difficult work of getting started: once we have momentum, continuing often feels easy by comparison. And when we’re rolling along, we usually don’t want to stop, because stopping means losing that ease and having to start again at the difficult beginning. Sometimes, we even forget how to stop; momentum takes over us completely and we zoom right through everything, perhaps rolling right over things in our way. But what if the “things in our way” are things we care about: our loved ones, our time to relax, our sense of self?
A pause, a breath, a moment of stillness, is a point of awareness. Being able to cultivate the skill of pausing when you’re on a roll is necessary to remain aware of the larger world around you. In last month’s article, we looked at handling setbacks on the road to accomplishing goals, how the periods when things stop moving forward force us to pause and return to our values. We often talk about taking a pause when we’re angry or stressed, when we’ve failed or when we have negative thoughts circling in our heads. It may be easier to see that disrupting our negative thoughts and feelings with a pause is a useful technique to manage the times where things don’t feel right. It may be harder to see the benefits of pausing in the midst of positive or productive periods. But when we pause, we can better see the world around us, we can better hear the voices of our loved ones. Even if we don’t experience external setbacks, we want to be able to pause ourselves along the path to realizing our goals, so we can keep our values centered along the path to realizing our goals. It’s within the pause that we are able to appreciate the fruits of our momentum, to see how far we’ve come.
Mindfulness and CBT techniques can help us develop the skills necessary to take those essential pauses. If you’d like to work on mindful pauses, reach out today to find the therapist that’s right for you.