Just before eclipse season begins, I have a pause point built in. On Thursday we leave for five days in southern France: time with wonderful friends, books on the beach, food worth lingering over, and the adventure of being somewhere different. We weren't thinking of the eclipses when we booked, but of course, the timing has turned out to be perfect.

As someone who consciously works with the eclipse cycles, here's what I'll be doing, and deliberately not doing, over the coming week, and why.

The benefit of a pause

Momentum can be seductive - full schedule, a familiar rhythm, patterns of living that carry you forward without asking much of you. When those patterns are healthy and directionally true, they serve. But when they've begun to skew, even by a degree, momentum becomes the problem. You travel faster in the wrong direction, and then correction tends to turned slowly, with effort.

A disruption interrupts that. A pause lets you check in before the correction becomes costly. You...