“Do you blog?” “You must blog!”  “What do you mean you don’t blog?”  Comments to me, the woman who resisted e-mail as long as she could.  The former lawyer who still wrote longhand on yellow legal pads long after word processing became de rigueur.   

My daughter rolled her eyes when I told her my website now had a placeholder for a “blog.”  Her reaction was the most insightful, as it often is.  So many people I know seem caught up in a non-stop e-mailing, tweeting, Facebook status posting, Blackberrying, texting, blogging, well — roll.  Me included at times, and wishing I could take back the occasional banal, angry or typo-encrusted missive. 

Whatever comes into our heads immediately moves through our fingers and out into cyberspace.  Send.  Play.  Fast Forward.      

All keys worn to the nub except one:  the pause button.

What happens when our failure to pause is played out in the real world where lives, families and marriages are at stake?  Well, in those instances, an easy-in marriage can turn into an easy-out divorce.   Aided and abetted by the law of no-fault divorce that now exists in all 50 states, which permits one spouse to simply decide one day that the basic building blocks of our culture – marriage and family – are history.  Assisted by a legislatively blessed legal system of judges, lawyers and support personnel who galvanize the process of family disintegration to its inevitable conclusion.    

No pause button. 

Rare is the existence of a waiting period in the no-fault divorce system before the litigation tanks begin to roll.  No mandatory counseling exists either where children are involved.  Neither is there a process for parents to explore the possibility of reconciliation.  All systems are set to “go.”  And those who would dare resist dissolution of their family are often dismissed as recalcitrant troublemakers who lack the ability to face reality and simply move on.    

We know what happens in life without the necessary pauses.  A baby not quite ready to walk, tumbles.  The teen-child who still needs her mother’s guidance becomes a mother herself.  We step out from the curb before we see the bus.  And parents who might otherwise get through the latest crisis with patience, forgiveness and counseling?  We know all too well where so many of them end up.   

The beauty of the pause is that it has the power to bring us back to who we are and what we hold dear before we step pell-mell from the curb, propelled into action that can irrevocably change everything and accomplish nothing.