Power of Pauses!

Recently i was back to my favourite past time hobbies, snooker. I had hung my cue years back as mentioned in my previous blog due to certain reason. However i believed that season has past in my life. Anyway, i started practicing a couple of months back on the average once a week. Initially i was dismayed by the lousy performance in the earlier games. It seemed like i have lost the touch from the standards i used to have previously. After a while, i decided to evalute my games and spend some time in youtube observing some of the top players in action. One of the key critical reason I found which affects my game was the lack of pauses in my delivery stroke. If you are an avid player, you'll know that it is so important to have pauses in every stroke. In a good stroke, there should be 2 pauses and a nice follow through action after the second pause.

After making the changes and of course some practices, my game rose from leaps and bounds. I was making half centuries once in a few game.

Lesson i drew from this which is so relatable to life. Sometimes as we move on in life, we tend to stretch ourselves to the limits by doing a lot of things, going from one place to another. It is almost very difficult to learn how to say no to certain things in the name of wanting to expand our capacity and doing great things in life. However, not knowing that we are all humans and our body is subjected to deteriotion as we grow older in age. This was evidence in some of my peers serving in ministry. I've seen so many of my fellow cgls who started so promisingly, doing so many great things for God, ended burning up after a few years of ministry especially so when they turn 30s, starting to have their family and children. Do they stop loving God anymore? Answer is usually no. Do they still want to serve God. Answer is Yes. However due to physical and spiritual tiredness which results in unfruitfulness in the things they do, wrong thoughts came in and allow themselves to deviate away from their goals and dreams.

Hence in this blog i wanted to hightlight about the power of pauses which might be of help.

Some points about pauses:
1) Pauses does not mean that you are slowing down or ineffective.
2) Pauses allows you to take a breather to recuparate.
3) Pauses allows you to observe things better from a different angle.
4) Pauses helps to realign ourselves back to the original plan we started out with.

Symtoms when you should take a pause:
1) You find that you are complaining all the time.
2) You find that you are stuck at a certain thing for too long.
3) You find that waking up in the morning seemed so tiring.
4) You find that goals & dreams are not enticing you anymore

What to do during your pauses:
1) Stop wanting to get back to your work immediately.
2) Do something you enjoy the most.
3) Sleep and rest well.
4) Sweat it out.
5) Forget about the things that upset you.
6) Pray.
7) Read some lighthearted materials.
8) Set yourself a time to get back in action.

Know that in life is not always a long marathon. But it can be many 100m sprints. There are no hard and fast rules on how many and how long our pauses should be. But the key is that all of us finish the race well.