The pause that refreshes

When the slogan "the pause that refreshes" came to me this morning, I thought I was remembering it from Pepsi Cola advertising. Maybe I was, but in an article on cola advertising, that particular slogan isn't listed as having been one of either Coke's or Pepsi's, although the word "refreshing" occurs in several other slogans.

Well, never mind. The refreshing pause that I'm talking about is the pause that an aware person interjects between a stimulus and the person's otherwise automatic response. That pause is (or can be) refreshing precisely because it gives the person the opportunity to exercise a choice as to whether to act automatically or in some new way—even a very innovative way.

In the religious context, a person's automatic response to "the stimulus of life" (or perhaps more poignantly to the stimulus of learning that we all die) might be to believe as the person's parents believed.

Muhammad Asad reports in his memoir, The Road to Mecca (1952), that he found very attractive to himself personally what he observed in the 1920's to be the cultural tendency of Arabs to do just that: believe as their parents (and virtually everyone else around them) believed. To Asad, this was a very good thing, integrating an Arab's physical and spiritual life into something peaceful, natural, anxiety-free—unlike the European's neurotic, awkward, spiritual anxiety. In other words, whatever pause the Europeans had taken to cut themselves free from precedent was, to Asad, anything but "refreshing" spiritually.

Yet myself, very unlike Asad, I feel rather at home and comfortable with pausing to exercise my thought and creativity. I can hardly imagine ever becoming a "Muslim automaton."

Anyway, that's my current take on one of Asad's theses in The Road to Mecca (as I now read Chapter 5 of 12).