On pause, stillness, and the fertile void
In the gap between exhale and inhale lies a world entire. Here lives a different kind of fullness, the pause that holds all possibility before the next breath chooses its direction. Here also lives anxiety, the place where we lose ourselves, where emptiness feels like falling.
We live as if the spaces between, matter less than the things themselves. Between words, between thoughts, between the ending of one thing and the beginning of another. Yet it is in these intervals that life reorganises itself, where the unexpected slips in through the cracks of certainty. It's also where doubt creeps in, where silence becomes uncomfortable, where we reach for our phones.
Watch a performer freeze mid-gesture on stage, holding the audience in suspension. In that deliberate stillness, something electric happens. The pause becomes charged with potential, heavy with the weight of what might emerge. Or it falls flat, becomes awkward, makes everyone squirm. The silence teaches us that meaning lives as much in what is withheld as in what is revealed, and sometimes reveals nothing at all.
There is an art to this dwelling in the between, and an art to fleeing from it. The dawn that is neither night nor day can be magical or simply cold. The shore that belongs to neither land nor sea draws us to walk its edges, until the tide turns and we're trapped between staying and leaving. The moment between sleep and waking when the day's possibilities haven't yet hardened into the inevitable - unless insomnia has kept us suspended there all night, possibility curdling into dread.
Our systems both create and devour these pauses. The same technology that gives us endless distraction also offers us meditation apps. The same economy that demands constant productivity also sells us wellness retreats. We fill every silence with podcasts while paying for silent meditation sessions. The body knows better, except when it doesn't. The heart rests between beats, until anxiety makes it race. The mind dreams between thoughts, until thoughts loop endlessly. Even the earth pauses between seasons, except when climate change blurs the boundaries.
To practice the space between breaths is to practice a quiet form of rebellion, or a privileged form of escape. To insist that not everything must be filled, while living in a world where unfilled time can mean unpaid bills. That emptiness has value, when emptiness might also mean empty stomach, empty bank account, empty house after the eviction. Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is nothing at all. Sometimes nothing is all we can afford to do.
In music, it's the rest that gives meaning to the notes, unless the silence stretches too long and the audience starts coughing. In conversation, it's the pause that lets understanding arrive, or the pause that signals someone has stopped listening. In protest, it's the moment of silence that carries more weight than any chant, or the moment when energy dissipates and everyone goes home. The space between breaths is where change gathers its courage, and where change loses its nerve.
Children know this space differently than adults. They can disappear into it completely, lose hours in the gap between one game and the next. Then we teach them to be productive, to fill the silences, to answer quickly. We meditate to remember what they haven't forgotten yet, then wonder why our meditation feels so effortful.
The plants in the abandoned lot practice this space daily. Growing in the cracks, thriving in the neglected intervals between human attention. They don't call it mindfulness or presence. They simply inhabit the pause between what was planned for this space and what might come next. Sometimes they get mowed down. Sometimes they become a garden.
Perhaps the future lives in these spaces, in the willingness to wait without knowing what we're waiting for. To listen without demanding answers. To let something unexpected breathe itself into being through the cracks in our relentless forward motion. Or perhaps the future requires us to act now, to fill the pause with purpose, to breathe deeply and then run.
The space between breaths refuses easy categorisation. It shifts between question and answer, between practice and accident, between refuge and exposure. Here, where nothing and everything happens at once, we learn that some experiences can only be entered, never explained.