Chapter 5 - Pause

Chapter Five – Pause

We spend much of our lives labelling things.
Objects. Places. Memories.

People.

In this chapter, Drew reflects on names, silence, kindness, loss, and the small but important space between seeing and speaking.

From childhood nights and quiet streets to funeral chapels and everyday encounters, Pause explores what can happen when we slow down long enough to truly notice one another.

Because sometimes the most important part of any conversation isn't the words at all.

It's the pause between them.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome. Each week I'll be sharing stories, stories drawn from real life, from people I've met and moments that I've witnessed. Sometimes they're remembered exactly as they were, and sometimes softened by time, but always brought to you with kindness and care. Welcome to Big Sies and Small Ponds. Chapter 5. Pause. It seems the most natural and human of actions to want to label things, like sewing name tags into a blazer as a child prepares to enter the world of a new school. The dates we write on leftovers that we're desperately pushing into an already full freezer. The way in which people label all the tools hanging on a shed wall. That way you'll always know which one you've loaned to the neighbour and we'll probably never see again. There is an endless list of things that we can label. And as I write this, I'm immediately transported back to my own school days and the great joy of being given control of the Dimo labeller and clicking the letter wheel around to spell out everyone's names and then sticking the mostly correctly spelled labels on desks and drawers. It's not just things we like to label. We do it to people too. This might seem a slightly strange way of expressing it, but isn't that what a christening or a baby naming service is? Parents labelling children with a name they'll carry, the name they'll be known for, the name which, when you speak it, well it summons up all the feelings that we have about someone that we know and love. The poet and philosopher Maya Angelou perhaps said it best, and I paraphrase, of course, we might not remember everything somebody has said or done, but we never forget how they make us feel. And we know that when we hear their names. We hang our emotions and thoughts and memories on a name. For those who live long lives, their names resonate with their own history, and not all are granted that privilege. And one of the hardest jobs I have to do is lead funeral services for children and babies. I'm not going to discuss specifics, of course, you wouldn't expect me to, but when a family loses a child, there can be a tendency for people to well, they'd rather cross the road to be honest, than speak to a grieving parent, because they probably don't know what to say. That's understandable. Even I struggle to find words on those occasions. But I was once given a rather beautiful hint as to what might help one particular family. I met with parents who'd lost a baby, an unexplained and devastating loss, and the father was very quiet during our meeting. As I was preparing to leave he stood, looked me in the eye, and said just say something nice and no bullshit. I cling to that advice to this very day. But back to those who might cross the road rather than confront a parent's grief, consider this if you will. So if you cross their paths, never be frightened to mention their child by name, a name that may bring tears to their eyes, but also music to their ears. The label they gave their child, you see, was a label of love. Not empty, just quieter. Night shifts, when the city seemed to fold in on itself, streets stretching out under orange lamps, the occasional car passing like it had somewhere important to be, but mostly there was stillness, quietness, and you learned to listen differently then. Not to the silence, but for the absence of it, for the thing that didn't quite belong the smashing of glass, a screech of tyres, a cry in the dark, and long before that I recall childhood nights, lying awake, window slightly open, an owl calling somewhere beyond the dark, or the faint, almost secret scuttling of mice getting on with their lives. Small sounds, but in that quiet they mattered. They filled the space without disturbing it. These days the world isn't like that. There's always something making a noise, a hum, a buzz, a ding, a passing noise that doesn't quite leave. Where's the pause in this almost constant barrage of small sounds? And yet I'm not someone who wants silence all the time. I've known good noise too. The warmth of a theatre at the end of a show, the moment when applause rises, hopefully not politely, but well earned. And you feel just for a second that something special has been shared. And of course, music. Music that doesn't invade the silence, but sort of sits in it, cradled, if you will, filling a space without taking it over. But there is another kind of quiet, a different kind altogether. The kind that doesn't come from the absence of sound, but from the presence of something bigger. I've been present when a last breath has been drawn, and there is a silence that follows that which is unlike any other. Even in a busy street, with life still going on around you as if nothing has happened, you pause and you hear that silence. Not empty, not peaceful exactly, just still. As if the world itself has stopped making a noise even as it moves forward, just for a moment, and there's that overriding sense of quietness in your head to give that pause for you to acknowledge what has happened. No one speaks because there is nothing to say that would improve it. And in that silence, everything that mattered is already there. I've also sat with families as they try to find the words to explain a life, to describe love, to talk about a loss that doesn't fit neatly into sentences, and there's a quiet that settles then too, not awkward, not uncomfortable, just thoughtful. People searching gently for the right memory, the right way to say that this mattered, that they mattered, the right words to try and hold something that feels too big to hold. And often the most honest moments you can imagine come in the pauses between the words. I recently read Desiderata at a funeral. You know the one that begins go placidly amid the noise and the haste. And it struck me then, more than it ever had before, that perhaps we are really being asked to do something special, and that's to learn how to move between the two, between the noise and the quiet, not to be overwhelmed by either. Because I don't think silence, that the pause, is something that has to be filled. It's something that has to be respected. It gives shape to what follows, and it gives meaning to what has just been. Without it, even the most beautiful music becomes just noise. What I think I've come to understand standing in chapels, walking those streets of the past, remembering those childhood nights, is that the pause is really matter, not just in music, but in life. Because in the pause, well that's the chance we have to notice. And sometimes it is in the pause that we not only notice, but we understand. So the other day I'm minding my own business, just crossing the street. The green man is calling me to the opposite side. The sunshine is warm upon my back. I'd just come from a funeral service, so I was wearing my scruffy blue suit, and all was well with the world. And then a voice rang out. And I was called well, something that I'm not going to repeat. Nothing particularly original, nothing I hadn't heard before. It was said in passing, almost as if it were part of the everyday noise of life, a word thrown out and left behind, like litter. And if I'm honest, it didn't really hurt, not in the way you might expect. But what stayed with me was something else. It was the lack of pause. I found myself wondering what does it take to arrive at a moment like that? To see another person and not see them at all. To speak without the briefest flicker of thought of how those words might land. Not cruelty exactly, not in any grand or deliberate sense, well you hope, but just this absence of thought. And that's the part that gives me pause. Not what was said, but how easily it was said. As though the space between seeing and speaking had simply disappeared. And I find myself asking questions that I can't answer. Did it make them feel better? A small moment of power, perhaps, or just something to fill the silence? Did they think about me at all? Or was I simply a shape passing by? A bulky target of convenience? Nothing more. And then there's the question that lingers a little longer. What did I really feel? Well not anger, not really. Not even sadness in any sharp sense. More a kind of quiet recognition that the world can sometimes be a place where people forget to notice one another properly. And yet that hasn't been my experience of life as a whole. Most of my days have been spent in situations where the opposite is true, rooms where people choose their words carefully, where they do pause, sometimes for a long time before they speak, where the weight of a sentence is considered, because it matters how it lands. I've seen kindness there, not the loud kind, not the kind that draws attention to itself, but small, deliberate kindnesses, a hand placed gently on an arm, a word chosen with care, a silence that speaks louder than anything that can be spoken. Which makes those other harsher moments feel out of place. Not because they are rare, which they certainly are not, but because they're so out of tune with what we're capable of. And perhaps that's what stayed with me the most. Not that someone chose not to pause, not to think, but that I know we can. Perhaps kindness isn't something we've lost. Perhaps it's something we just have to keep choosing. In the smallest of moments, in the briefest of encounters, in that tiny space between seeing and speaking. And perhaps if we could just hold on to that space a little longer, we might begin to recognize each other again. Not as labels, but as people. Perhaps I was the man who didn't quite understand, or the one who got something wrong, or simply the one who passed through without pausing to notice enough. And maybe, without ever intending to be, I've been the bad. Or even the ugly in someone else's telling. And that's a difficult thing to accept. Because we all like to think that we're the good ones, the kind ones, the thoughtful ones. But life doesn't divide itself up so neatly. It shifts depending on the moment, on the circumstances, and what we see and what we fail to see. And perhaps that brings us back to that space again, that small, almost invisible space between seeing and speaking. Because maybe that's where the difference lies. Not in who we are, but in what we choose in that moment. That moment when we pause. Maybe to like and share these stories here on Big Skies and Small Ponds. And you'll be very welcome the next time we meet. Until then, enjoy writing and living your own story.