From a post not long ago to the Jack’s Winning Words blog comes today’s inspiration –
“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops, but when you press the pause button on human beings they start…to think, to reflect, to reimagine what is possible.” (Thomas Friedman)
So often life becomes hectic and we allow ourselves to be swept up in the hustle and bustle of trying to keep up, trying to make snap decisions and react quickly to the changes that are happening around us. What we need sometimes is our own pause
button for life. We need time to think and reflect, to evaluate things and, possibly, to reimagine our role and reactions to what is happening. How many times we think back to situations and from that new point of view, say to ourselves, “if only I had thought of this back then.” Perhaps you would have thought of that back then, if you had hit the pause button.
So maybe imagining that you do have a pause button is a good way to deal with things. Maybe we should hit pause and step back from the situation long enough to think and consider all of the possibilities and reimagine our future direction. Hurtful things that 
happen to us often elicit equally hurtful reactions from us and usually just end up compounding the problem. Problems that are so big that they overwhelm us too often cause responses that are overly ambitious and not well thought out. Pausing to see how to break the problem down into a series of smaller and simpler responses can lead to a much better chance of success.
In my life I have a built in pause button in my two dogs. We take four walks a day, starting with the first one at about 6 AM each morning. Those walks, each lasting about 20-30 minutes, require that I pause and give me time to think about things. The first walk of the day is my planning walk, in which I have the chance to reflect on what is upcoming during the rest of the day and lay out a plan of sorts. The two in the middle of the day provide a pause to reflect on what has happened, what things I ‘m faced with responding to or allowing me to make changes to my original plan in reaction to how the day has gone so far. The end-of-day walk allow for reflection upon the events of the day and the decisions that I made. That pause allow me to learn from the day’s events and hopefully to increase my store of knowledge on how to deal with upcoming events.
You really don’t need dogs to walk in order to pause in your daily life; but, you do need to have the discipline to hit the pause button a few times during your day, in order to give yourself time to reflect and make the best decisions on what to do next. The ability to reimagine what is possible is critical to good mental health. The alternative is to allow yourself to become overwhelmed by seemingly impossible situations and perhaps to 
slide into depression because you see no way out. You may wish to say a little prayer, asking for God’s help with the decisions that you have to make or perhaps you would finbd comfort in the little prayer that I use and have written about here many times – “Not my will, but thy will be done.”
Pause and think, reflect and pray – then reimagine your future. It’s the pause that refreshes.
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