PAUSE RESET REBIRTH

 

    ©tedorè

September 2025 

It begins, sometimes, not with a decision but with a slowing. A loosening. The world, so insistent in its demands, suddenly feels as though it can wait. My body drifts, my mind follows, and the horizon stretches wider, softer. There are moments when the very act of floating feels like a rebellion: against velocity, against the cult of productivity, against the illusion that forward is the only direction. 

In water, time forgets me. The minutes dissolve into ripples, the weight of hours thins into translucence. There is no urgency here, only the hush of suspension, the quiet reassurance that something greater is carrying me. Perhaps this is what it means to press pause, not to abandon life, but to return to its undercurrent. Not to disappear, but to remember. The surface trembles around me, yet I feel steadier than on land. To pause is not absence; it is permission. Permission to let the self unclench, to exhale, to resist the endless contortions of performance. Here, I am not asked to prove, to shine, to explain. I am simply permitted. And in that permission, a tenderness awakens, toward myself, toward the world, toward the fragile architecture of existence that we so often trample in our haste. 

Rebirth, I have come to believe, does not always thunder with grand proclamations. More often, it arrives quietly, like the smallest exhale at the edge of day. A face tilted toward the sky, eyelids half-closed, water holding the body in its palms. It is not the spectacular but the subtle that remakes us. The ocean teaches this: that renewal is not about acquiring newness, but about dissolving back into what has always been waiting beneath the surface. When at last I stand again on solid ground, the world resumes its noise, its appetite, its insistence, its thousand little demands. Yet something lingers. A rhythm quieter than clocks, a current steadier than calendars. The knowledge that beginning again is not a feat, not a performance of transformation, but a return. 

To float, to pause, to surrender: these are not escapes, but rehearsals for living. And in them, I find the gentlest form of truth.