The Pregnant Pause

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"The silence that occurs after someone has said or done something that leaves everyone who bore witness to the event speechless. ... A pregnant pause often occurs when something that requires a sarcastic response happens, but no one quite knows what to say or do."

In the world of reality in martial arts and karate the pause is that void, space or space between the beats where nothing occurs. Nothing is not a true word but it presents the idea of a space, that which nature encoded in our DNA that presents a beat of nothing between each stimulus.

The pause/void, that which separates all things in our world. The OODA operates naturally this way, it is understood that the loop and how it can be manipulated by taking advantage of the pause/void between stages is a solid indicator to the existence of the void in nature. There are natural pauses between each stage of the loop:

• Observe;
• (void) pause:
• Orient;
• (void) pause:
• Decide/Decision;
• (void) pause:
• Act/Action;
• (void) pause:

The pause/void is nature’s natural way that allows us to take advantage before acting or being acted on. 

Briefly:

Observe/Observation: Assumed by people to what one see’s with the eyes. It is more than that. There is vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste. We use vision a variety of ways, the two major being, “direct vision” and “indirect or peripheral vision.” Hearing is what sounds are detected in the environment, touch is tactile sensory input by hand, i.e., your hands touching and feeling the adversary or your skin being touched to feel how that is manipulating your and your body/mind. Smells is detecting such odors that trigger a warning that something is close and potentially dangerous. Taste is how our taste buds detect odor’s in the air or things put into our mouths, i.e., a street person with brain difficulties approaching you up close from behind where you detect that terrible street dirty smell of gross body odors. 

Observation, to observe, is about awareness, education and understanding through training, practice and experiences. If you don’t know what is dangerous and how it would trigger your reactions/actions when detected by the sensory system how can you act properly to self-protect? Awareness is a huge subject and discipline for those training and practicing self-protection regardless of its form, i.e., martial arts, karate or other. 

Orient: Assumed by folks as putting one’s eyes on the possible danger but it is more as people reading to this point already understand. It is when the mind focuses on the actual danger, categorizing it and then using other factors and memories to get to the next level. Your peripheral vision might pick up a trigger event out of direct vision; your hearing may detect a sound that says, “watch out;” you may feel someone or feel their presence to your side or behind; as already told you may detect a smell that trigger your spidey sense and you may get a bad taste in your mouth coupled by a butterfly feeling in the pit of your stomach. All these tend to orient your mind toward possible danger and thus trigger your spidey sense so that your mind collects memories and encoded conditioning that would transmit to the next level, Decide or Decision. 

Decide/Decision: Here is where the rubber meets the road where your deepest conditioned mind chooses the appropriate conditioned responses. This is where your training, practice and experience come together and provide you with either proper self-protection or a whole heap of trouble all the way to the State Penitentiary. If your conditioned responses are not properly set, chosen and taken to the next step or level things go bad fast. Your past the sensory stimulus input process although the senses are still taking it all in and processing it and maybe some change occurs that triggers you back to safe-mode but if adrenaline stress-conditions are triggered and training is not adequate that may not be registered at the proper levels. 

Act/Action: This is when you avoid the danger, escape and evade the danger, de-escalate the danger or you act with physical violence to end the danger, i.e., grave harm or death being put on your head. It must be appropriate, adequate, effective and within the parameters of the social and legal requirements of self-defense defenses. Anything else puts you in the legal system cross hairs, sometimes even when it is really and truly self-defense. 

Now, in every stage described there is this transitional period that can be mere milliseconds, or faster, where you can, if you train well, shift speeds and direction all coming from the above described processes of the mind, mind-state and mind-set. It comes back on how you trained, how you practiced and how you experienced that training and practice if no reality experiences is experienced. 

We always have that moment, even as short as it is. We even have those voids, pauses or spaces, between what our eyes register for vision and what the mind creates of that vision - a combination of what is visually detected and created from past memory/experiences. This is why when walking in the woods and picking up a shape in our peripheral vision we may jump back, open our eyes wide and hold up our hands to ward off the danger only to find it a stick and not a dangerous snake. Think about this…

Void, pause, space, etc., are likened to those things that make the music of life or all we would experience is the clamor and clanging of back-to-back sounds that would confuse, stress and hinder true logical thinking processes, etc. 

Karate and martial arts people then understand that to achieve success we must detect that pause or space or void, anticipate the pause or space or void and disrupt the process causing a loop disruption often putting or resetting it back to observation. 

This means speed is not really about how fast your hands and feet move but how your mind perceives and acts in a way that disrupts the others loop thus making the adversary slower and you faster. 

Think of the term, “instantaneous?” Instantaneous really is non-existent, it is not possible in the reality of the Universe. There is, like the space between atoms, always a space, a void or a pause, etc. regardless. It comes down to how we use, manipulate and subvert that void to our advantage. Everything else comes after. 

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