By Amanda Knox

Yoga taught me that a full breath comes in four parts. Breathe in, pause, breathe out, pause. The all important pauses are ever easily glossed over by the eager amateur, like myself.

It’s a weakness of mine, especially when it comes to making decisions about change. It takes courage to acknowledge the feeling in your gut, to sort it all out, to realize a conclusion and implement it against the momentum of the things that are already. After all of that work, I get so excited that I’ve made it that far that I often forget to pause to examine the new stillness in my life before setting off in a tantalizingly different direction.

You’d think it’d be easier to recognize the moment to pause with the many forms it takes throughout anyone’s life.

It is the moment after you’ve placed the soccer ball at the PK line. The goalkeeper slaps her gloves together and teeters in her squatting position. You stare blankly past her searching eyes, knowing you’ve practised over and over where to aim your shot, not to change your mind in the few steps run-up to the ball, but still you don’t really know where the ball is going—and whether it will make all the difference—before your foot makes contact.

It is the moment after the nurse has swabbed the spot on your arm with alcohol. You haven’t yet closed your eyes for the pinch. You watch her reach for the needle. You’re aware of the room, the paper sheet on the patient’s table you’re sitting on. You could leave, but you stay, knowing why you’re there.

It is the few minutes in the theatre after the movie, when the credits run and you don’t read them. You sit there in the dark, absorbing what you’ve just seen, feeling yourself radiate, slowly remembering the room full of other people around you.

Even those times that are forced upon you may be turned around and treated as decisive moments of pause: the traffic light, the bus stop, the grocery line, the prison sentence...

A world without pause looks to me like tumbling. Action is made mindless when inextricably tied to the steady and unrelenting beat of time. The anxiety of missing out drives you into falling behind. You react instead of proact. You overlook the opportunities to reset your mental processing, redimension your issues in the abstract, encounter the familiar in new way that was previously overlooked. You forget to say I love you when you leave. You forgot, even, to say goodbye.

The psychologist and existentialist philosopher Rollo May wrote in his 1972 book, The Courage to Create, “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.”

I too find that courage is the word that most resonates with my own experience of what is necessary to live a self-aware, empowered life. It takes courage to sit in stillness and examine one’s choices from the perspectives of both before and after. It takes courage to hold out against being swept up in the next potentially good thing for fear of missing it. It takes courage to recognize that the stakes are ourselves.

A sigh lets go of what was and makes room for what’s to be. A pause is the chance we give ourselves to choose who we are.