The mental and emotional ‘pause’, the open state, allows the topic of one’s expectation to go down like the sun – and arise again in a fresh light. One can then pick up the thread of what one was doing or talking about with a fresh mind and a shift in perspective – or one can decide to drop it. There’s an opportunity for a transformative choice.

Because unless you’ve deliberately paused and released it, a thread of grievance or passion has just gone into storage – and will arise later. Threads don’t drop by themselves when the mind that is holding them moves into the background.

But the possibility that the pause offers is to place a topic under an open timeless light; having reviewed it, its basis can be seen and relinquished. And at other times, having let an idea rest in that aware space, new angles and insights into it arise as the mind re-engages.

Ajahn Sucitto