Life-changing moments are rarely controlled. They simply arrive, usually unexpected. They can come in lightning bolts or passing thoughts. But no matter how they materialize, they are unique, personalized, and seemingly sculpted to affect the greatest impact. But even after they pass, these changelings always seem to grow greater purpose. I met my moment ten years ago in an unexpected place.
In 2011 I ventured not just to Cuba but, more particularly, to the year 1959. Havana was a city where time stood still. When Americans and capitalism retreated from Cuba, Havana didn’t change. It stopped changing. In many ways, the completion of the Revolution meant that the face of Cuba would forever be frozen in the 50s. No more beautiful European architecture was to be built. No more American cars were to be shipped into Cuba. No more beautiful seaside casinos were to be born. It was a land where time was truly frozen.
I couldn’t help but wonder how much of our America of the 1950s still lived in Cuba and how it must have felt living then as compared to today. I wondered if Cuba could transport me back to see this time with fresh eyes and if it would change me.
To my surprise, the shift was sudden and jarring. I lost my first modern convenience instantly. Cell access and the Internet simply ended as I stepped off the plane. No more Google. No more calls. No more text messages or emails. Gone, all gone.
So, I walked the streets without a single beep coming from my phone, knowing that I would not have emails to check, that there would be no calls coming in, and that I would have no calls, emails, or texts to return. It started to sink in pretty quickly. I had trials coming up, clients with immediate problems that had to be solved. I was sure there would be unexpected motions to deal with, and what about the office itself? Surely, someone would call in sick, perhaps a mistake would be made, and I, and I alone, would have to make quick and important executive decisions.
As time passed, the white noise started to clear, and I envisioned a better way through a new lens. You see, Cuba is a place where the speed of living life is calming. Time is slowed. Nobody is in a rush. Waiting—waiting in line, waiting for food, waiting just to sit and watch—becomes a part of everyday life, not an annoyance, but a pleasure. I pondered the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and embraced the opportunity to live a simpler life.
When time is freely given, spending time is like spending free money. There is a sense that more will simply be made. How nice to be given a clock that doesn’t tick so loudly. I had time to smell the roses, to enjoy a cappuccino, to have a leisurely lunch, and to stay out late, deep into the night.
Turns out, I was on to something I hadn’t realized. I needed a pause—a pause from work, from emails, from pleadings and letters. I needed a pause from making business decisions, planning trial strategies, and paying bills. I needed a pause from social media, a pause from print media and everyday news. Turns out, I was really stressed and didn’t fully realize exactly how crazy it all was. I never stopped moving, fixing, planning, paying, strategizing, working, and doing. That, I had thought, was the way life was, but Cuba had given me a life-changing moment. Cuba had planted a seed that I alone could nurture if I appreciated the value it held.
So, I stopped, I stopped cold and paid attention to the present. I stopped being “there” and started being “here.” I started reflecting inward. I started doing nothing.
My journey to Cuba started a longer journey, one that led me to opening a yoga studio, cultivating a daily meditation practice, and living a life filled with long hikes in the mountains and hours floating in lakes, rivers, and the ocean in the quest for a simpler life, a life with less stress and more joy. But here is the truth of it all: I never stopped practicing law. In fact, I opened a second law firm, built a winery, and began rapidly growing my firms at a pace where they doubled in size and revenue every two years on a sustained basis.
So, here is the quandary: How can doing “nothing” help you do more? The key is your ability to “pause.” It was my “pause” in Cuba that changed my path toward seeking greater joy, greater focus, clearer priorities, and a life more worth living.
If you don’t pause to reflect, then you run the risk of navigating life blindly. Baseball great Yogi Berra once famously said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else.” How many people do you know who get to midlife and then realize they don’t like their jobs, or where they live, or even their partner? It happens because we start down a path with our first job, or a vision of what we think we want to do, and we follow the path too long past the point that we can simply stop and begin again. Planning your life for happiness isn’t a strategy or a plan as much as it is really just a technique.
Here is a great example. Best-selling author and coach Richard Leider spent 25 years interviewing 1,000 people toward the end of their lives who had retired from successful and satisfying careers. After his interviews, he observed that “they got so caught up in the doing that they missed the meaning. They overwhelmingly wished they had stopped at regular intervals to look at the big picture.”
Put another way, nobody ever died regretting that they didn’t work more. Without reflection, we all run the risk of veering off course, working too much, and loving too little.
Therefore, it is a necessity to reflect on where we are and what it means to us. The path to having less stress and more joy may begin in many ways with choosing your path more often. Life is full of course corrections, but they are best made with you driving the choices. For many, life feels more like a river that sweeps us up and takes us away down the rapids of life. But paddling over to the shore regularly to stop and see where you are and where you want to go from here is critical to building a life with purpose and on a more sure path. It all starts with a pause, if only for a moment today and another moment tomorrow until you are practiced in the art of the pause. Take a moment to do nothing, to observe your life, and to feel where you want to go so you can build a life supported by things that make you happy and give you purpose.
According to Steven Keeva, author of Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life (ABA, 2011), here are a few signs that you have lost your way and need to stop and pause:
And here are less obvious indicators that your life may need rebalancing:
If this is you, then you may consider rebalancing by taking time to pause, reset, and chart a better course.
Here is the second tip to leveraging “doing nothing” into living better and being more productive: Give your brain some space. Pausing gives your brain some space, some relief, and some time to breathe for a moment. So many of us as lawyers spend our day reacting. We run a brain marathon every day but never stop long enough to give our brain a chance to catch its breath. Who can run without resting? Your brain is no different. Give it a moment to pause, rest, reset, and settle.
According to Janice L. Marturano, the former deputy general counsel for General Mills and executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, “A mindful leader embodies leadership presence by cultivating focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion in the service of others.”
It turns out that those who train themselves to pause and step away from the fire can create a space within themselves where they can go to take a break from the craziness of the regular world. The reward is improved focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion.
If you train yourself to pause, to take a cleansing breath, to close your eyes, then you are cultivating a safe space where you can go at any time. Imagine how nice it would be to open an imaginary door into a soft and comfortable room where you can be alone, peaceful, quiet, and calm. Then, when you have caught your breath, reset your attitude, and regained your purpose, you can open the door and return again to the moment you left. How nice to have a place always waiting for you when you need it most, like, for example, the first day of trial day, angry ex-spouse day, back-talking teenager day, or late to work and stuck behind a really, really, slow car day. Without a quiet place to go, who knows how you may show up, but the odds are, you may not always show up being the person you aspire to be.
I often refer to this secret room and the space it offers as “vacation brain.” I call it that because I first found this place when I was on vacation. I had planned a nice relaxing trip to Hawaii but ended up working through the first half of it. I had not really given myself a vacation, just a new location to work. But then, after a week, something peculiar happened. All the “noise” and worry just faded away. I had arrived at my vacation. I watched the waves, felt the sand, smelled the sweet breeze. And as soon as I did, there was a transformation. New ideas started flooding into my head. I felt creative, energized. All the busy noise had stopped. I was able to relax, have fun, and truly “unplug.” When I returned home, I vowed to learn how to return to that space in my mind. So, I started with a simple pause, a few minutes meditating, and then grew it from there.
The power of giving our brain some space provides great mental health benefits. Why? Taking a moment to pause helps:
But what if you just don’t pause? So what? Well, if you do not “pause” when you are in a stressful situation, perhaps feeling unsafe, being attacked, or “on the spot,” then you risk acting in a manner you regret. For example, without a pause you probably didn’t notice that:
But with the pause comes the calm, and you will find that:
And with these skills, you build a less-stressful and happier life, not by happenstance but on purpose, by pausing and “doing nothing.”
As a result, you may perform better in court, you may be a better partner, your back-talking teenager may not even faze you, and you probably won’t even notice the slow car in front of you all the way to work.
As I left Havana in the back seat of a 1956 Plymouth Belvedere taxi, I began to make a list of lessons learned. I update it from time to time. Here is my Top Ten List:
