✦ PAUSE ✦
We were looking for a hot dog.
Bite My Wiener — famous dog shack, according to the internet, worth the detour. When Mia discovered it was a halfway stop on our road trip — we couldn’t stop laughing. Tears of silliness. Mia and I pulled off in Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, ready to experience the best hot dog ever. And it was gone.
We could have gotten back in the car.
But we didn’t.
Instead, we walked toward the sound of water. And the Youghiogheny River was just… there. Moving the way rivers move — unbothered, unhurried, completely indifferent to our original plans. We found Cucumber Falls tucked into the hillside like a secret. We stood at Ohiopyle Falls and let the sound fill up all the space where the to-do list used to be. There is such a peace with listening to the river rush by.
Mary of Bethany sat by the river when there was dinner to make and guests to tend. I used to think that was about devotion. I’m starting to think it was also just about knowing when to stop.
We stopped. And everything that followed was a gift.
✦ SEE ✦
Washington DC in April is wisteria and cherry blossoms and the kind of beauty that makes you walk slower without deciding to. We sat on swings at the Wharf and ate chimney cones (insert drool face here) and wandered through a flower library and let the National Mall remind us how small and significant we are at the same time.
And then we went to the Holocaust Museum.
There is no gentle way to enter that building. You walk in carrying your ordinary day — the vanilla chocolate twist waffle cone, the tulips, so many tulips, walking along the Potomac, watching the planes drift over the Jefferson Memorial — and the weight of what human beings have done to each other meets you at the door.
The heaviness of hate.
I knew about the shoes. I had seen them before — in photos, in documentaries, I thought I was prepared.
I still gasped, the wind was knocked out of me, single tears down my face.
Thousands of shoes belonging to thousands of people who had names and families and ordinary Saturdays. The last witnesses, Moses Schulstein, a Yiddish Poet calls them. And that undid me — because that’s exactly what they are. They are still here, still testifying, because they were not made of blood and flesh – they avoided the hellfire he finishes – still asking us to stay and look and not turn away.
I held the smell of wisteria, the gorgeous pink of cherry blossoms and atrocity in the same afternoon. Beauty and devastation in the same hands. That is the full range of what humanity is capable of — and presence means being willing to hold all of it, not just the parts that are easy to carry.
The river teaches you to be still.
The museum teaches you why it matters that you stayed.
✦ BREATHE ✦
Four astronauts just came home from the Moon.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen (and of course Rise) — the Artemis II crew — traveled 694,481 miles and farther from Earth than any humans in history. They named their spacecraft Integrity. On the way home, they stopped and hugged each other inside the capsule.
They paused and took a moment to appreciate each other once again. That is something special.
Commander Wiseman said from inside the capsule: “This sense of teamwork is something you don’t usually get as an adult. We are close like brothers and sisters, and that is a privilege we will never have again.”
He knew it while he was in it. He named it out loud. He let it matter.
That is the whole practice, isn’t it? Not just being present — but knowing you are. Saying so. Letting the moment land before it becomes a memory.
Lili Villarreal, the Landing and Recovery Director who brought them home, said it simply: “I get to be part of that. You get to be part of that. How cool is that?”
How cool is that. Said by a woman who didn’t sleep the night before because she loved her people that much.
Someone reminded me last week of a shift in thinking — what if you changed your approach from I have to do that → I get to do that. And from what should I do → what could I do.
Sometimes healing looks like 694,481 miles away from everything. Sometimes it looks like knowing exactly where you belong in the mission.
Planet Earth, you are a crew. – Astronaut, Mission Specialist, Christina Koch
✦ GROW ✦
I’m writing this from Lewes, Delaware.
The first town in the first state. State #45 for me — a quiet crossing-off, a small private celebration. The laughing gulls are doing exactly what their name promises. The waves are arriving and arriving and arriving, the way waves do, like they have nowhere else to be.
As we sat on a blanket on the beach, I asked my daughter and my niece what they were thinking.
They both said: nothing.
Two women in their twenties who overthink so many things, who carry the weight of becoming, who are learning — like all of us — how to live in a world that asks so much. And the ocean gave them nothing. The good kind. The kind that feels like exhaling for the first time all week.
The water heals.
It doesn’t ask you to produce anything. It doesn’t need you to have a plan. It just keeps showing up — rivers, falls, ocean — and it makes room for you to be a human being instead of a human doing.
The astronauts were intentional about the hug. We were intentional about the river. Presence never just happens — it’s always a choice.
Stay anyway. Choose the moment. Drink it in.
Look around. Right where you are.
There is a river somewhere in your life asking you to stay. A moment you almost drove past. A person sitting next to you who won’t always be there. A gift so ordinary you almost missed it as holy.
Pause. See. Breathe. Grow.
The same God who carved the rivers and flung the stars and knit together four astronauts 694,481 miles from home — that God is present in your ordinary Saturday. In your detour. In your nothing.
This is the presence of humanity. Not the highlight reel. Not the extraordinary moment. Just you, right here, choosing to be in it.
You don’t have to earn this moment. You just have to be in it.
With Big Hugs, So Much Love,
Stacy
Stacy Bergman
Founder and Head Coach, Brisalo
Always Rooting For You!
Brisalo Coaching & Wedding Services
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April 12, 2026 | Brisalo | The Gentle Pause — Issue 08, 2026
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