“I wrote a book on Pause. But never expected this.”
Robert Poynton on what happens when the world is put on pause
“If you don’t stop to think, life will force you to stop and think.”
I wrote those words two years ago, for my book Do Pause. It explored why we need to pause and how to go about it. I was thinking of individuals who burn out, of how relentless activity eclipses all warning signs, and the body raises its voice, sometimes brutally, in a determined effort to be heard.
Today, the words from two years ago have wider resonance. Life is now forcing us to pause on a planetary scale - individually and collectively. Only three weeks ago I wrote a piece about giving ourselves permission to pause. That seems like ancient history now. Whilst some will be working intensely to help people who are ill, or salvage their livelihoods, for many of us, a pause of some sort is now an obligation. All of a sudden, we have no choice. We cannot continue as we did.
You don’t need to believe that our planet is a single organism to agree to this, it is simply happening. One form of life (Covid-19) is forcing another (us) to stop. The flows of people and goods which make up our normal lives, are being stemmed, forcing us to turn in upon ourselves.
This is abrupt and disorienting. In a society which is ‘always on’ we are not used to pausing. The fact it is difficult is revealing. It is also absolutely compelling and entirely new. Humanity has never lived a moment like this before. For decades, if not centuries, we have been weaving a global web, tightening the sinews that bind us, accelerating the pace of exchange, making it easier for people, ideas, products and diseases to move and spread.
Yet never before have we had the capacity to observe the effects of this as they unfold, in real time. Never before have we been so visibly vulnerable, together. And never before has each and every one of us had the capacity to both sense and respond, with global reach.
What will this mother of all pauses hold for us? At this ‘still point of the turning world’ what might we learn? What will we sense? How will we respond?
The immediate response shows us that the human capacity to invent is everywhere. As a friend of mine put it, “in the midst of chaos, human resourcefulness is having a field day”. There is an amazing amount of creative adaptation and improvisation going on. This doesn’t surprise me. In a previous book I argued that we are highly skilled improvisers, we just don’t recognise it, or value it. That is becoming visible now.
Some of the responses are heart-achingly beautiful – who could not be moved by the people of Siena singing to each other from their balconies? Others show an extraordinary capacity to self-organise. For example, every evening a wave of applause sweeps across Spain, as people sealed in their own homes put their hands together from windows and doorways, in a public show of appreciation for health workers. The idea spread (like a virus?) via Whatsapp. Yet no-one knows how it began. Or how everyone agreed to switch the time from 10pm to 8pm. But they did. It is an author-less work of human genius, now taking place all over the UK as well.
We are seeing how strong our need for connection is. There are an infinity of generous, kind, initiatives as people reach out to help each other. Street support groups, offers of food, free coaching, consulting or yoga online – you name it.
We are learning how to touch each other with words, when we can’t touch each other physically – sensitive to their power to shape things, we questioned the term ‘social distancing’ as soon as it was coined.
A leader in a leviathan bureaucracy now writes daily letters to her team, revealing more in a week than she might normally in a year, allowing them to relate as people, not colleagues. In the face of inflexible bureaucratic rulings about home working, she stands up for her people, and for common sense, even at a cost to herself and her reputation.
A pause also allows you to notice and appreciate that which you normally ignore. A friend, in self-isolation, searches for a ‘nugget of peace’ each day – a moment of tranquillity or beauty; a pause within a pause, where she can simply be.
Amidst the mayhem, we are also capable of having great fun with it too. A car parked in our street sports the bumper sticker “Toilet paper not stored in vehicle overnight.”
On a practical level, we are realising that we don’t need to be in the office all the time (or maybe at all?). We have discovered that we can do more than we knew with technology we already have. I was one of the nearly five hundred people that participated in ‘The Sofa Singers’ choir, where James Sills used a video conferencing platform to connect people all over the world in a moment of musical (or not so musical!) melding. ‘Stand by Me’ will never be quite the same again. And no doubt seeds are being sown for brilliant new technologies that we didn’t know we needed – until now.
Perhaps, once we emerge from our confinement, we will cherish the time that we do spend physically together at work, embracing all our senses and using our embodied intelligences to create richer, more lively ways of working, rather than sitting passively through slide presentations that slide off us. Perhaps rather than go to meetings, we can meet as humans?
Beyond these immediate responses, what deeper possibilities might this pause hold? The truth is, we have no idea how this will unfold. Our illusion of control has been shattered. Our sense of time has been warped and stretched. A week ago is ancient history; next week lies way beyond the horizon. And this is only a beginning.
That hasn’t sunk in yet. The automatic rush to move anything and everything we do online is understandable but frantic. It keeps us busy, but if we aren’t careful, busy becomes the new lazy. Whatever immediate action we each need to take, we also need to reflect on how we got here. If, without missing a beat, we simply fill the void with a new kind of frenzied activity, trying to be ‘productive’ (whatever that might mean now) until we ‘get back to normal’, we will miss something far more important – the chance to shape a new normal.
In the natural world, the pause in our activity is already creating new clarity –literally. In Venice, the water in the canals is clean enough for fish to be coming back. Dolphins frolic in silent ports where ships lie idle. The speed with which the pollution in the skies over Wuhan reduced, was striking. It becomes easier to see, and harder to deny, the effects of our actions on other forms of life. Which raises a big question: can we use this time to see ourselves more clearly too?
We have the opportunity to do exactly that. In the 1970s, the famous photograph Earthrise, of the blue green orb that is our home, suspended in the darkness of space, enabled us to see the whole planet, as one, for the first time. It had a profound effect. Now we don’t just see it, we can feel it too. We are having a shared experience of what it is like to be isolated from each other. How ironic.
Whether you interpret this as a feedback loop, a message from Gaia, the gods toying with us (“like flies to wanton boys”) or the forces of nature doesn’t matter. Just as our own bodies speak up (by breaking down) when we fail to pay attention to the vital signs, something beyond us is making its effects felt.
Those effects could be transformative. But if we want that, we have some significant letting go to do, on many levels. We have already had to let go of daily habits around work, school or social life.
But it goes further. We will need to be willing to let go of all kinds of expectations and plans. For example, only if we let go of the belief we can have an endlessly expanding economy of exploitation, can we begin to design one of regeneration. And in order to do that, we have to let go of some ideas that run so deep, and have been with us so long that we aren’t even aware of them. As psychologist James Hillman said “ideas we have, but don’t know we have, have us”.
The ideas of conquest, domination and control that have driven us for centuries are now a serious liability. It makes no sense to continue to act as if we are separate – from each other or from the living systems on which we depend. Just like every other living being (including coronavirus itself) humanity is only one thread, entangled in an impenetrably complex web of life. Understanding that means accepting that whilst we can influence it, we cannot control it.
Shaking off this deeply rooted way of thinking and acting will be hard – practically, psychologically, emotionally and economically. But transitions are never without turbulence. And it was always an illusion that we were separate anyway. A compelling and useful one for a while perhaps, but an illusion nonetheless.
So some kind of pause was inevitable and necessary. In any creative process, it always is. As one of the musicians I interviewed for the book said: “without a pause, everything continues as it was”. It would be impossible to create a future for humanity that is not just sustainable, but delightful and fulfilling, through inertia alone.
So this pause is an opening. It acts as a portal to other options and choices. We do not know what challenges or possibilities lie ahead, but we will discover whether we have the courage to put this time to constructive use.
Robert Poynton is the author of Do Pause and Do Improvise, and is an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.
Do Pause is available on Do Books (includes free ebook download) | Bookshop.org
For more on pausing, watch Robert’s live recorded Do Lecture, ‘Why We All Need To Pause Right Now’.
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