The Pause and The Promise

~ by Jan Cook, November 2025

Many of us recently viewed a video of Jane Goodall who, in the last year of her life, shared what she wanted us to hear, after her death:

“In the place where I am now, I look back over my life. I look back at the world I’ve left behind. What message do I want to leave? I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. 

You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters, and you are here for a reason. 

And I just hope that reason will become apparent as you live through your life. I want you to know that, whether or not you find that role that you’re supposed to play, your life does matter, and that every single day you live, you make a difference in the world. And you get to choose the difference that you make.”

These words went directly out of her gaze into the camera, and into my heart, affirming what I have felt since I was a small child: that I need to promise to remember that I am part of a special universe. I knew, even as a young one, that my job was to never forget that, but also take care of this sacred world. 

At age 26 I was invited to “take a stand” for the sustainable end of chronic poverty and hunger on this earth with an organization called The Hunger Project.  Breathing a sigh of relief, I had finally found a place for me and others to keep remembering the sacredness of our lives. I made that promise and felt a glimpse of the power we have to collectively make a difference in the world.

The underlying premise of that promise is very much what Jane said to anyone who would listen – that we create our world in our words and actions: those words we speak out loud, and those we speak internally to ourselves.

With others, I studied the collective thinking and the invisible systems which shape our cultural beliefs and behaviors, waking up to the systemic forces of, for example, scarcity, insufficiency, inevitability, fear, and “little me who can’t make a difference.” Like Jane patiently studying the chimps’ subtle and sometimes brutal behaviors, many humans now have a choice to intentionally generate new systems in our thinking and in what the Hunger Project called the “beingsphere.”

Now, I would humbly add to Jane’s and the Hunger Project’s words: That we create collectively in the silent unknown from which our words come. In deep listening to the generative space beyond words, we also meet the choice and difference we can make in our being and collective actions.

That promise has shaped my life over decades and eventually led me to writing these paragraphs as a member of Pachamama Alliance, an organization birthed by a friend  and teacher, Lynne Twist, who listened to my Hunger Project promise with the human heart and ears of one who took me – and the layers of what I knew as me – seriously.

Recently, in hearing Jane’s words to all of us after her death, the promise was stripped of its naïveté, and informed by my grief over what we humans can do to our home, our kin, and each other. 

And I ask, “How does a single human take seriously and with devotion the thoughts, plans, ambitions, and actions to live a life inside this promise? How does an aging woman embrace, with grandmother arms, the work of justice, and not get overwhelmed, exhausted, discouraged or immobilized by the harsh words of self-criticism and embodied collective trauma? 

I hear the whisper – “In our thoughts we create our world.”

For me and those I partner with, like you who are reading this note, I am sharpening, honing a discipline to PAUSE, to STOP and listen to the internal voice that is running the show, give it a break and listen to the silence from which those thoughts, stories, and ambitions come. I then focus every cell of my conscious life into the natural world of which I am a mere energetic swirl of inter-being and not so important as those words and stories would have me believe!

As I begin to open to the rhythm of our beyond human world, the self-talk dissolves into surrounding trees losing their chlorophyll, and like all other light eaters, are transitioning into their beneath the earth fecundity and interconnection.

I feel the cycles of moisture and waters of my place on this blue planet shifting into a different pace of evaporation, dew formation, clouds accumulating, rains soaking and frost freezing, readjusting from the summer drought.

That sometimes harsh sunlight is now moving in relationship with us, so its direct rays are with us for shorter times and remembered in the moon-lit darkness. 

If I slow down to hear the birds who are busy re-crafting their nests, I am in awe of what only God knows they are communicating!

Because I can, my first step of keeping my promise is to stop and feel the depth of life activity under my feet, surrounding my body as I turn towards the quiet from which the life force lives.

And for a moment I am free from the incessant internal chatter of “do more, accomplish more, fight for more, fund more, more, more, more,” in my cultural bias that my actions and being are never enough.

This irrepressible force of nature replenishing itself, I write on the eve of No Kings Day. Now, a week before the election, and the real ramifications of the big beautiful bill, I find the silence to renew my promise of a sacred world. 

To rest in gratitude for the cycle we are in and for the luminosity that can come from the darker, colder realms. I can practice over and over to put aside my habitual tendencies towards “not enough” and instead right-size expectations, needs, and loneliness into appropriate action.

For many years, my church has had a collective ritual for this time of year called the Greater Good Project in which the grown-ups choose three initiatives for people in need locally and internationally, and present these to the children of our congregation. The young ones then participate and learn about the democratic process by educating and debating and finally choosing one local and one international initiative to receive our offer of support.

They educate their parents, our members and friends to look at unnecessary consumerism around the holidays, and with their families, make plans to spend half of what we would normally spend, and creative alternatives to express our love for each other in the turning of the light.

We then, in collective ritual, contribute the other half of our budget to The Greater Good.

Each year the children walk up with their families, and place their red envelopes into baskets as a collective offer to the projects they have chosen.

Over these years we have given thousands and thousands of dollars to the greater good of our community. This gives us a place to put our money where our words are and listen to the silence of these times when there are so many with so little.

And in that silence, and concerns about our future, I feel the choice Jane implores us to remember that I can:

• continue to consume, that which I don’t need

• worry about what might happen and neglect what is actually happening

• get caught up in judgements and stories about how terrible things are

Or – as one who is given time to turn towards the sacred:

• I can be an ally for those whose lives do not give them time or safety to PAUSE.

• I can be renewed in the gift of a fortunate life.

• I can breathe in the unknown mysteries of this time on earth,

• and be reorganized by new depths of gratitude and insight.

• And, over and over:

Remember to keep my promise.