Pause.

“Um, why haven’t you been blogging? Is something wrong?”

Just the night before I got that text message, a friend had ever-so-gently suggested the possibility that nobody had noticed the week-long radio silence on my blog. She was mostly right; blog posts written poorly just to check another thing off my list are much more noticeable than a few days without an update.

Still, it was nice to get a message from a [different] worried friend wondering where I’d been. And by “nice,” of course, I mean it made my day.

It’s true; I haven’t been blogging much lately. I reached a point this month where I couldn’t do more, think more, give more, take more. I needed to pause.

Sometimes we choose to pause. To breathe, to reflect, to refresh. But it seems to me that what happens more often than that we are forced – by circumstances outside of our control – to pause.

My recent pause is a combination, really. I didn’t truly sit down and CHOOSE to take a break. I wasn’t so TOGETHER and WITH IT that I recognized my symptoms of burnout and meltdown, then proactively decided to get healthy or something. No, it wasn’t really like that.

It was more of giving myself a pass for a day . . . and then another day . . . and then SNOW. And then . . . BROKEN COMPUTER. Oh right, here come the out-of-my-control pause-inducing circumstances.

Look, I realize that having one, typically calm little girl with an impressive attention span and willingness to nap home for four snow days isn’t the most challenging situation in the world. I mean, for the love of spoiled mothers, she sat quietly one afternoon for TWO HOURS, working on a glittery sticker number mosaic thing. Two hours! Quietly! Working!

Still. Having my kiddo home for four snow days (FOUR. Did I mention that part? FOUR.) made it difficult to spend much time writing.

And when you add a laptop that’s on its last keys to the situation, well, blogging is the last thing I’m able to get done. (I’m kidding. Obviously the LAST THING is mopping. It’s always mopping.)

So I paused. I caught up on laundry (You know what happens when my cat barfs on my bed the day after my child wets her bed? The laundry wins.). I made a pretty, glittery sticker mosaic thing with my kiddo. I cleaned up my inboxes and had a few conference calls. And, of course, I read some books.

But most importantly, I let myself live in the pause. For the most part, I didn’t feel guilty about not writing. I thought about writing – and the parts I missed . . . and the parts I don’t. I made some plans for writing. But FOR THE MOST PART, I paused.

According to my weather app, Snowmageddon has passed. And if it’s not this weekend, it will definitely be sooner rather than later that I get a new, WORKING laptop. And though I still feel overwhelmed by a lot of things right now, the pause – and the cleaning of inboxes and kitchens – did its job.

So I’m pretty sure this pause is over. I’m thankful for the pause, but I’m sure glad to be back, too.

When was the last time you p.a.u.s.e.d.? What was the catalyst that made you stop, breathe, remember, rest, live?