Sneak Peek: The Power of the Pause

This morning, I received a WhatsApp message from one of my pilgrim friends, who has returned to Spain with her husband and is spending a few days in Zaragoza. On Bette’s vacation, the city is a beautiful place to explore for a few days between San Sebastian and Barcelona. On my pilgrimage, it was the blessed oasis where Porter and I ground to a halt, nursing our blistered feet and his sudden fever.

A peek at the calendar revealed that I was in Zaragoza exactly two years ago this weekend. What more excuse do I need to share an excerpt of Finding God Along the Way with you? This is from Chapter 25, “Pausing.” It picks up in Tudela, after Fr. José doctored Porter’s and my disastrous feet, shook his head, and gave us directions to the train station.

There’s an old tale in which Himalayan sherpas (or, in another version, African tribesmen) are hired by a group of American trekkers to transport their supplies. After a few days of walking fast and far, the locals sit down and refuse to move for several hours—waiting, it’s explained, for their souls to catch up with their bodies. Although I didn’t have the liberty of such on-the-spot refusal along the Camino, I did come to appreciate the power of the pause.

My longest was the three days I spent in the city of Zaragoza. On a Monday morning, Porter and I caught the train from Tudela, ensconced ourselves in a café so I could write for a while, then walked slowly to the Hotel Sauce. Doing our best to approach this wide-open day with wide-open spirits, we lingered wherever we saw something interesting. We stopped in a hardware store for a carabiner to secure the straps of Porter’s old suitcase and visited a department store—El Corte Inglés—to invest in new hiking socks. That brief stroll recalled us to ourselves, reminding us how much we enjoy exploring a new city. It also helped us see beyond our transitory struggles, anchoring us in the surpassing goodness of our life together.

Despite our having a free day on Tuesday, by Wednesday morning my feet were still awful, and Porter was feverish—felled by the slow-moving stomach virus that had been making its way through the group. We would have to linger in Zaragoza for one more day. Our hotel room had a bathtub with a broad ledge at one end, allowing me to indulge in two refreshing pastimes while Porter slept: soaking my feet and perusing the New Yorker magazine I’d optimistically chucked in my suitcase.

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Late [the next] afternoon, I made a long, solo visit to the Basilica of Nuestra Señora del Pilar—Our Lady of the Pillar—whose origins were the stuff of legend. When St. James began evangelizing the Iberian peninsula in the first century, the story goes (preaching the Gospel “to the ends of the earth”), he almost despaired of bringing the Christian faith to that pagan land. One day, while he was deep in prayer along the banks of the Ebro River, the Blessed Mother appeared to him atop a rosy pillar, encouraging him not to forsake his mission.

Today, the cavernous interior of the Basilica houses an intimate chapel where a tiny Mary statue sits atop a pillar of pink jasper. Even though the Basilica felt cold and empty, the chapel was warm with the devotion of many visitors; I was lucky to witness a weekly ceremony where children receive a special blessing and get their picture taken with the statue. Pausing in prayer, I felt something shift in me; heading back to the hotel, I realized that I was walking much more easily. Like the apostle James in that same place almost two millennia ago, I felt a renewed hopefulness and a readiness to rejoin my friends on the road the next morning.

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Though the three-day break in Zaragoza was a great blessing, pauses did not need to be long to be restorative. On our steepest climbs, when the grade was fierce, I allowed myself to stop for a few deep breaths every ten steps. Count to ten; stop and breathe. Count to ten; stop and breathe. In addition to getting much-needed oxygen to my lungs and leg muscles, this strategy kept hope in view. I knew that in seven . . . five . . . three more steps, I could take a brief, blissful pause, until the terrain grew merciful, and I could press on without stopping.

The most delightful pauses arrived unexpectedly. Occasionally, as we walked through the woods, a clearing would open and—voilà—a café where we could grab a quick cortado and use real restrooms. Fr. José never told us they were coming. This was consistent with his desire to keep us in the present moment, though I suspect he also relished being able offer us a pleasant surprise. Those periodic oases of rest lasted just long enough to refill my well of gratitude before starting out again.

Perhaps my insight here seems obvious. Take a break; do you really need me to tell you this? But maybe you do; maybe, like me, you tend to soldier on. Maybe you never take a sick day (or didn’t, until COVID made bringing your germs to work seem less heroic). Maybe you wouldn’t dream of closing your eyes for five minutes after lunch. Maybe you stare at the Sunday crossword puzzle long after your brain has stopped generating solutions, or routinely accept diminishing returns for your labor in exchange for the ego boost you get from thinking of yourself as a person who “never quits.”

So, in case you do need to hear it, I’ll say it again: There is power in the pause. Whether for a moment or an hour, a day or a week, a well-timed pause can reconnect us to ourselves, giving us fresh energy and perspective. More importantly, the pause can reconnect us to God—inventor of the Sabbath, after all—for whom accomplishment is never everything.

You know who knew this? Jesus. He routinely slipped away from a life of preaching and miracle-working to pause, pray, and recharge. “Come to me, all who labor and find life burdensome, and I will give you rest,” he said—not “and I’ll give you more to do!” Holy pausing is not about taking the easy way out or shirking our share of life’s burdens. It’s about acknowledging our utter dependence on God, who alone provides strength for the journey.

Cover image by Alexander Gresbek from Pixabay