One o'clock on a Monday.
A man wrote down the afternoon he was racing home for a drink. His words: the strongest impulse and compulsion and need to get it down. It's like I was on autopilot.
Then three sentences a hundred people stopped on. Normally, I would immediately say no. Something made me pause. I wanted to try it.
He never says what he was saying no to. Doesn't matter here. Read the middle sentence.
Something made me pause.
Not I paused. Not I decided. Something did it, and he noticed, and for once he didn't run it over.
You've had that. The beat before the reply. The hand that stopped on the fridge, on the glass, on the app, and you couldn't have told anyone why. You didn't build that pause. It arrived on its own, in the middle of a day you were sleepwalking through, and most of the time you drove straight through it because you were already moving.
The pause was never the hard part. It comes for free. The hard part is the one second after, where you decide whether it counts.
The one thing for the weekend:
The next time something makes you pause, and you don't know what, stay there one second longer than you want to.
Then notice what you were about to do without you.
Josh
P.S. I finished my 30-day Ash Journal run on July 30. In public, one page a day, no edits, all thirty.
Five minutes. One prompt. One line of ash. The first seven days are free: truevitalyou.com/journal