I learned about the value of the pause when I was a guest of a gracious and wealthy poet in her house in London. Her house was big enough to have its own lift, so I was watching my ps and qs.
I managed to survive until dinner time when she asked if I liked artichokes. I instantly replied that I did. This was my usual default answer in situations like this: agree with whatever the other person says. “Pass yourself”, in other words.
In fact I had only the dimmest idea of what an artichoke was and I don’t think I had ever seen one. They were not on the menu in our farm kitchen when I was growing up.
Had I paused to consider this, I might not have said “Yes”. Soon I was confronted by my first artichoke, a baffling collection of spikes with no obvious function and no way into eating it.
I sat at the dining room table on my own, my gracious hostess hovering as I stared down at this thing and wondered what to do with it.
Looking at the object itself gave me no help. It did not appear to have anything edible about it. I began to tear off the spiky leaves in the hope of finding a clue. No luck.
Finally, my hostess, eyeing the leaves scattered around my plate and presumably also noting my look of despair, asked solicitously,”Are you ready for your main course?” I was, and more than ready.
Habitual response
My dilemma arose from that habitual response – of agreeing with the other person – when I am not sure of my ground. A simple pause might have encouraged me to say I was unfamiliar with the glories of the artichoke.
But there’s more to the pause than artichokes. Creativity, whether at work, in the arts or in other aspects of life requires more pauses than action. When Oscar Wilde was staying at a country house he is reputed to have told his hostess at lunchtime that he had not come down to join the other guests because he was working on a poem.
Asked if he had done a great deal of work on the poem, he replied that he had: he had removed a comma. In the evening, when his hostess inquired as to how his work had gone for the afternoon, he said that he had put the comma back in again.
In doing so he was describing a hugely important part of the creative process, namely the pauses that allowed him to consider whether to remove or restore a thing as small as a comma.
Ritualistic conversation
It’s the same with relationships. At a conference with acquaintances in England a few years ago I observed how, when they both read their newspapers, they exchanged the same bickering remarks about Cameron, Clegg and immigration that they had obviously been exchanging for years.
There was a sort of ritualistic quality to their conversation and it continued when they talked about their grown-up children or their neighbours. They could actually be dead, I thought, with the same tapes playing every day.
That’s an example of how often we respond without a microsecond’s pause to consider whether this is the most helpful response or even whether we are responding to the right thing.
It’s just too easy to assume you know what is going on in your partner’s head and to give your stock reply to that. So you could go through the rest of your life never giving a truly genuine reply to the other person, or getting a truly genuine reply in return.
You could have a whole series of marital rows based on stock remarks. If you were both replaced by two well-trained parrots, the script would hardly change.
We lead somewhat pushed and driven lives at the moment, but the quality of our lives can be improved by cultivating the art of the pause.
That’s something I’ll remember the next time somebody asks if I want an artichoke.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email. pomorain@yahoo.com