The Practice of the Pause

What Sourdough Has Taught Me About the Pause

There are so many parallels I find myself noticing in this season of my life, and most of them reveal themselves quietly, without effort, as if they have always been there waiting for me to see them.

One of those parallels is something I learned long before sourdough ever entered my life.

“Practice the pause.”

It is something we say often in the rooms of AA. At first, it sounds simple, almost too simple to carry the kind of weight it does. But over time, you begin to understand that it is not just a suggestion. It is a way of living.

Because before that, before I learned to pause, I reacted.

I moved quickly. I thought quickly. I responded from instinct, from habit, from patterns that had been formed over years without ever being questioned. And those patterns, if I am honest, were not leading me anywhere I wanted to go.

My life had become unmanageable.

Not all at once, and not in a way that announced itself clearly, but in a slow unraveling that eventually brought me to a place where something had to change.

For some of us, that place is called rock bottom.

And from there, we are asked to begin again.

What I did not expect is that years later, standing in my kitchen, working with flour, water, and time, I would find myself being taught that same lesson all over again.

The pause.

Because sourdough does not respond well to urgency.

It does not reward rushing or reacting. It does not bend to impatience or adjust itself to meet the pace of your thoughts. It simply remains what it is, and it asks something different of you.

It asks you to wait.

It asks you to pay attention.

It asks you to pause.

There is a moment in the process, many moments actually, where the instinct is to do more.

To add something.
To fix something.
To move it along.

The dough feels too sticky.
Too slack.
Not ready.

And everything in you wants to react.

But if I have learned anything through this work, it is this:

Most of the time, what is needed is not more action.

It is less.

It is stepping back.

It is letting the dough rest.

It is trusting that something is happening even when I cannot yet see it.

That is the pause.

And I have begun to recognize that this is the same work I was asked to do in sobriety.

To interrupt the old patterns.

To stop the immediate reaction.

To create space between what I feel and what I do.

Because in that space, something else becomes possible.

Before, I would have moved quickly.

I would have tried to control the outcome, to manage the moment, to fix what felt uncertain.

Now, I pause.

Not perfectly.

Not every time.

But more often than I used to.

And in that pause, I notice something.

I notice that I am no longer being pulled in the same way.

I notice that I can choose.

That is where the shift happens.

So here I am, healing, rebuilding, learning to live differently.

And it is happening in ways I never could have predicted.

Not through something complicated.

Not through something dramatic.

But through something as simple as a jar of flour and water.

And yet, it is not that simple.

Because what I am practicing in the kitchen is not just baking.

It is presence.

It is patience.

It is steadiness.

It is the willingness to show up again and again without needing immediate results.

It is the discipline of not reacting when something feels off.

It is the trust that something is working beneath the surface, even when I cannot see it yet.

And when I look at it that way, the answer becomes clearer.

Is it the practice?

Is it the showing up?

Is it the patience?

Is it the steadiness?

Yes.

Because those are the same things that have allowed me to heal.

The pause is where everything changes.

Not because something outside of me shifts, but because something inside of me does.

It is where I stop repeating what no longer serves me.

It is where I allow something new to take root.

It is where I begin to live differently, not in big, dramatic ways, but in small, consistent choices that build over time.

And now, I see it everywhere.

In my faith.

In my work.

In the way I move through my days.

I no longer only turn to God when things fall apart.

I return to Him in the quiet.

In the pause.

In the moments where I choose to step back instead of step in.

Because that is where I can hear Him most clearly.

And that is where I am learning to stay.

Warmly,
Kathy
Art of The Crumb