Why waiting for life to change might be the very thing keeping you stuck.
Recently, two different people said the exact same thing to me within one day:
“There’s just no spark.”
Life felt bland and grey.
A kind of feeling flat where nothing was terribly wrong, but nothing felt alive either.
Now, if I suggested you go and buy yourself some flowers and actually take a moment to look at them, allowing a small sense of appreciation to arise…
Your mind might immediately respond with:
- That won’t make any difference.
- Why would I bother?
- That’s ridiculous.
And yet…
Think about the last time you stood in nature. Watching a sunset. Looking out over a view. Walking through a forest. In that moment it didn’t feel ridiculous. It felt real.
Why do we lose that spark?
Often, it’s not because life got dramatically worse. It’s because we’ve become completely absorbed in our thinking, disconnected from our sense of Self.
We live in our heads, believing each thought we have is a reliable reflection of reality and following every emotional reaction – while wishing to silence it all.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic wand that shuts thoughts down. But there is a way to interrupt their flow. And it starts by creating a little bit of space. A small pause in the constant stream of thinking.
Creating space doesn’t require hours of meditation
In fact, it can be surprisingly simple.
All we need to do is briefly connect to a part of ourselves that doesn’t involve thinking.
For example:
- Feel the soles of your feet – inside your shoes, or feeling the socks
- As you walk notice the pressure of your weight on the soles of your feet
- Also your feet are over a metre away from your brain – physical distance helps 😉
Or try this:
- Inhale, and count in your head for example 1, 2, 3
- Then make your exhale twice as long as your inhale: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
This type of breathing (ratio 1:2) has an immediate calming effect on your system.
You don’t need to do this for five to ten minutes (unless you have the time and patience). Sometimes three slow breath cycles with a 1:2 ratio are enough to interrupt the mental noise, even slightly.
And then what?
Use that small pause to:
- Look at something pleasant.
- Listen to music you enjoy, and dance to it if you fancy
- Notice something beautiful, even if it’s very ordinary
And take that in for a moment.
Then continue with your day.
Even noticing and taking in something pleasant for a few seconds is a shift – not a coping mechanism, but a small interruption to the automatic response your system is used to running. And every time you do that, you’re doing something different.
That is growth.
The trap we often fall into
We tend to wait for the outside world to change, to improve and get better, so we have a reason to feel happy and content. But in reality, this is often short-lived.
And right now there is always something:
- uncertainty
- bad news
- stress
- another looming challenge
If we wait for life to fully settle down before we permit ourselves to feel okay, we might be waiting for a very long time.
Your mind might argue that creating a pleasant moment in the middle of difficulty is fake. That you’re “cheating”. That peace is only valid once everything is sorted out externally.
With this inner dialogue, your mind is trying to stay in problem-solving mode, scanning for what needs fixing, analysing what went wrong, or anticipating what might happen next, even when there’s nothing you can actually resolve in this moment.
What you can do
You can allow yourself a pause, even if life is difficult right now. A moment where your nervous system has the chance to settle a bit. A moment where the stream of thoughts is interrupted.
So here’s the choice:
Wait for circumstances to get better so you can feel any spark…
or allow yourself something you already know brings you a small sense of enjoyment, even if your mind tells you it’s pointless.
💫
I buy myself flowers quite often and place them around the house. Every time I see them, I pause, I appreciate them, and they make me smile.
But it wasn’t always like that. There was a time when even being out in nature didn’t make much difference, because my head was so full of thoughts, that I couldn’t really take anything in, and the suggestion to notice something pleasant felt pointless, sometimes even irritating.
It was only when I started learning how to create small pauses in the stream of thinking that something began to change.
Now I know:
Those small moments of appreciation create tiny pauses in my system, and those pauses reconnect me to a sense of aliveness, a small spark that doesn’t require dramatic outer change.
Over time, this begins to shift how you meet your day. You may start to notice small things again:
- The light changing in the afternoon
- A friendly exchange
- Daffodils appearing as spring approaches
Your system becomes less wired into the negative, and you may start seeing what’s good around you more often.
Maybe life isn’t perfect right now.
But you do have a choice to begin noticing small things that lift your internal state.
Small sparks count! ✨
If pausing sounds simple, but you notice resistance…
You’re not alone. Often, the very things that would nourish us are the ones we find hardest to actually do.
I’ve written more about why we tend to resist slowing down — even when we know it would help — in this post:
→ The Art to Pause: Understanding Our Resistance to What Nourishes Us
