Whenever my mother came home from work, she never rushed straight into the kitchen to grate potatoes for pancakes or starch the bed linen. She would lie down for a twenty-minute nap—and only then get on with the housework.

She also fought endlessly against my stubbornness, trying to convince me that after school it was healthier to play games than to wrestle with sines and cosines. She would point to a scene from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, in which Katerina comes home from the factory and the first thing she does is sit down on the sofa to rest—still in her work clothes and boots.

But none of it helped me. I believed that rest was for the weak, and that people with goals should work twenty-four hours a day.

A friend of mine hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. For ten years, she hasn’t swum in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, or the Mediterranean; she hasn’t climbed Mount Hoverla or Mount Teide; she hasn’t wandered the streets of Budapest, Kraków, or Lviv, or stopped to admire the Dnieper. She sleeps five hours a night and relentlessly pursues her career, sincerely believing that any pause will set her back several years.

But her body is beginning to fail her: her eyesight has deteriorated, her nerves are frayed, and her heart sometimes skips a beat.

For a long time, I followed her example—until I learned about the law of the neutral position. It is as simple as the Pythagorean theorem.

Every change in life requires a pause.

A rest stop.

A chance to catch your breath, wipe the sweat from your brow, eat some lasagna, and touch up your lipstick. A chance to check how much fuel remains in your own energy tank, so you don’t risk breaking down in the middle of the road.

You cannot take a sharp turn at full speed. You cannot find your way out of a forest without first stopping to work out where north and south are. And no one can absorb six lessons in a row without a break.

We need pauses at every step: before diving into the water or making a high jump; before striking the final chord while playing Beethoven or reaching the high note in the romance Do Not Awaken Memories; before stepping onto a stage or beginning a new relationship.

Before telling a lie—or telling the truth.

We stop during the Christmas holidays and at red lights. A figure skater pauses before attempting a triple toe loop. A chess player pauses to consider the next move.

And if we refuse to pause and keep racing through life at two hundred kilometers an hour, circumstances will eventually stop us instead: a cold, a serious illness, an accident, a fire, an earthquake.

Everything in life has a rhythm: day and night, winter and summer, inhale and exhale. Even at a disco, fast songs alternate with slow ones. Even gym equipment is occasionally taken out of service for maintenance.

So perhaps that enlightened soul was right when he said that life must contain moments when nothing happens to us at all.

We simply sit and look at the world.

And, for a while, the world looks back at us.

Courtesy of:

Happy Changes
Irina Govorukha

Excellence Reporter 2026