Pregnant pause(ˈprɛɡnənt pɔz), idiom: A pause or silence that is laden with meaning or significance.
This is it. We’re here. We’ve arrived.
Charles Eisenstein, in his poignant essay The Coronation, writes about the historical moment in which we, as a global species, now find ourselves:
For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view,sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.
Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice.
We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.
This is indeed the moment of stopping. Of taking a full, long, deep breath. Literally, and figuratively. Individually, and collectively.
(Maybe a few breaths. There, that’s better.)
Exponential transformation is upon us.
The only thing we can anticipate now is the high likelihood that virtually nothing will be the same anymore. Our lives, livelihoods and ways of operating have simply been upended. For good. Disruption is the order of the day. Change is certain, but what form(s) will it take?
This is our choice point. Perhaps our most crucial, ever.
We’ve just begun to learn, at long last, how truly interdependent we are — as a species, and with our planet. And — providing that we actually show up — we’re about to learn how resilient we are, too.
It is in our choicemaking that our true power resides. And in the awareness that whatever choices we make, moment by moment, each has a powerful effect not just on ourselves, but also on one another and on our world.
To harm someone — whether ourselves or others — ultimately harms the whole; likewise, to serve and heal also serves and heals the whole. At each significant choicepoint, we can ask ourselves:
Could this choice I am about to make harm someone or something (including myself)?
Could it heal?
Does it serve?
This awareness offers us such a massive opportunity. Especially in this pivotal historical moment.
To serve and to heal is to offer a blessing. As Rachel Remen, M.D., writes so beautifully:
The capacity to bless life is in everybody. The power of our blessing is not diminished by illness or age. On the contrary, our blessings become even more powerful as we grow older. They have survived the buffeting of our experience. We may have traveled a long, hard road to the place where we can remember once again who we are. That we have traveled and remembered gives hope to those we bless. Perhaps in time they too can remember this place beyond competition and struggle, this place where we belong to one another.
This capacity to bless is innate in us, though often forgotten or sidelined until circumstances conspire to make us face, squarely, what truly matters in life. She continues:
I first learned to do this [in hospice,] from people who had moved into a more authentic relationship with those around them because only that which is genuine still had meaning for them. These people had let go of the ways in which they had changed themselves to win approval, and so they made it safe for others to remove their masks as well.
Masks off now. (The figurative ones, that is; those having to do with our identities, whatever they may have been before now.) And from this place of frankness, of self-honesty about what matters in the ultimate sense, let us ask ourselves this:
What is the future that we, as humanity, as this wildly creative, now globally-interconnected and technologically-potent species, choose to create together? And what do we choose, not in some time far removed from this moment, but rather in, as a friend of mine likes to put it, the next now?
Will we acquiesce to a terrifying MadMax-style future, one of the versions that media has been selling us for years?
Or will it be one in which we, as Dr. Remen writes so eloquently, actually bless the life that animates each of us? The life that we can find in all that we encounter, if we simply remember to breathe, come fully present, and allow ourselves to look more deeply?
It is key to note that our choicemaking includes choosing which belief system(s) and stories about reality we embrace, reject or ignore at any given moment.
We can choose an extant narrative — dystopian/utopian, black hat/white hat, shadow/light, lies/truth, fear/love or any of the circulating stories making the global rounds — or not; we can also opt out of the wrongmaking, black-or-white model entirely. We can also turn within, and trust that part inside us, the “still, small voice,” the one that knows and has always known our true North, regardless of circumstances.
The old question we were taught to ask, from the old world that assumed competition, conquest and striving, was “What’s in it for me?”
What if, just what if, thanks to this amazing pregnant pause in which we find ourselves, we were to completely reorient, and bring forth a new way of life, in a new world — one that assumes cooperation, service and thriving? What if we were to ask ourselves a brand new question? Such as:
In this moment, with this choice that I am making now, with these words that I speak or this action that I take — and noting well that not choosing is also, always, a choice —
“Who am I (who are we) blessing with this? How can I (how can we) be, or bring, a blessing?”
Why blessing?
Because kindness is our innate human wiring. Not greed, but kindness. Healthy, whole human beings are humane beings.
So much of what we believe(d) to be human nature is just human culture; an overlay, a manipulation. When we come back to center, returning to the truth of ourselves (brilliant opportunity for that now!), we can overwrite any superfluous programming. We are all capable of this, if we stop our human “racing” long enough to love our real selves without question or condition, as we did so easily as children. Stillness, self-trust and love will lead us to the eye of the storm.
And from thence, home.
∞
