The event is just data until we give it meaning and it is the meaning we give it that creates how we feel, then how we respond, then the results. The pause is the bringing of awareness into that moment when we interpret the data and practicing choice- choose to give the situation the meaning that moves us forward with peace or back to whatever it was we were doing before the triggering event knocked us off our centre.
I could credit it to the fact that I was becoming more aware of the ability of the mind to tell stories and to give the meaning that elicited the most familiar of emotions and practiced of interpretations. I also knew how anger just needs an uncontrolled sense of injustice or entitlement to feed on and it can live on forever. But maybe it wasn’t awareness alone that made this time different- that kept me rooted in the present.
A study David Eagleman of the Baylor College of medicine, demonstrated that our consciousness lags one- twelfth of a second behind actual events. Maybe what I experienced was that time lag- that pause between the data (the event in memory) and the interpretation or tag that I had attached to it.
Usually, it would have been an automatic jump from event to reaction or in this case, memory to feeling, without any realisation that the two were separate things like that subliminal split second command from your brain to your legs and the walking itself.
But this time, I could recognise and differentiate the memory of the event from the reminder to be angry about it . And I reminded myself that in the present I was unhurt. It was a nice, sunny afternoon with a scenic view. I wasn't the me in the memory who was hurt by another's actions. I was the me in that park, visited by a memory of an event long gone.
With this clarity, I was able to dismiss both event and memory and stay in the present.
