When You Can’t Stop

A reflection inspired by Nick Kientsch on the Insight Timer App

I was listening to a meditation this morning on Insight Timer by Nick Kientsch. It’s something I came across a while back but had mostly forgotten about, this concept of living life without punctuation.

So think about how you read a book. When you reach the end of a sentence, you pause briefly before moving on to the next. You pause again at the next period, read, pause, and repeat.

Now imagine taking out all of that punctuation and how overwhelming it would be to read without any stops. Suddenly there would be no indication of where one thought ends and the next begins.

That's how many of us live our lives.

We go from one thing to the next to the next to the next. And then we either crash at night, fall into a deep sleep, wake up the next morning, and do it all again. Or especially if you're a midlife woman, you might fall asleep for a bit, but then you wake up, and you're just continually thinking, doing, unable to stop.

Over time, it this lack of a pause takes on even more energy and becomes like a runaway train. You feel like you can't stop it even if you tried.

So we start to think we need something really big, a major break, in order to stop everything. And sometimes we take that break. But when we return, we go right back to this life without punctuation.

The thing is, sustainable change doesn't require something big. It's about putting in a period every now and then throughout your day. Putting in a slight pause.

I often share something a meditation instructor once told me: meditation could be a single, intentional breath. That’s always stuck with me, because we often hear that meditation needs to be 20 minutes, or that it needs to look a certain way.

But it doesn't. It could be one intentional breath. One moment where you pause, pay attention to your inhale, feel your exhale, feel your body. Maybe it's feeling your feet on the floor, or the surface you're sitting on supporting you. Maybe you extend it and make it three breaths.

When I first started practicing mindfulness, I noticed I would leave my office and be halfway to my daughter's school before I even realized it. So I started using my transition time, the space between places, as a pause. Because it's very seldom that taking three breaths is going to negatively impact your day. It might make you 30 seconds later for something, but usually, you can afford 30 seconds.

Where could you try a little punctuation in your life?