It was in October of 2006 that I was selected to participate in a program called The Philanthropy Workshop West (“TPW”).  The invitation came at a time in my life where I’d been on overdrive in many professional endeavors and my father recently had passed away–leaving me an “orphan in the universe.”

This crossroads called for a reassessment of my own commitments, as I needed to ferret out what truly mattered to me. It was time to pause and reflect on my life’s direction. For TPW’s final module, each of us were tasked to choose a non-profit organization we would become involved with as a participant, and prepare a 40 minute presentation incorporating our learnings from the nine-month TPW program in our engagement with this organization.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was planting the seeds for invoking my own pause. I didn’t define it that way then. I felt that TPW might provide such an opportunity over the course of the 9 month program.

Fast forward a few months into January 2007, and I was walking my little Maltese dog on Sonoma’s bike path and ran into Lisa Micheli, a casual acquaintance and Switzer Fellow. Each of us had independently seen “An Inconvenient Truth” at our local cinema, and we started to discuss its impact on people and their feelings of helplessness about climate change solutions on both an individual and local community level. I knew that a part of me just wanted to put my head under the covers.

Lisa said she had some ideas that she would love to explore– that could impact the Bay Area, and would love to brainstorm with another Switzer Fellow friend, Healy Hamilton, currently the Director of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics at the California Academy of Sciences. But she didn’t have the time professionally to think about them given the demands of her job.

In that moment, my creative muse appeared: “What if I fund them to take time off in a place of natural beauty to brainstorm and collaborate?” All that I would need from them was some sort of “product” — a report and hopefully some video footage and photos I could use in putting together a powerpoint presentation for my grant presentation for TPW.

This afternoon walk and talk, and the synchronicity therein, was the launching of Invoking the Pause.

I chose the word “Invoke” deliberately. I feel that there is an element of sacredness in “unplugging” from the pressures of chronos — or ordinary time with all of life’s necessities calling to us, to step into the field of chairos – a sense of timelessness. That space is the place of pure creativity where true solutions can be found.

Lisa & Healy invoked their pause in April that year. After I read their report, I realized that they needed more time and additional funds to further develop and scale their ideas, in order for larger funding sources to step in at a later date–so I came up with the 2nd phase of funding, which I called “Seeding Possibilities”.

As I prepared my presentation in early May, I initially thought it was just about funding their project. However, one day while walking on Sonoma’s Overlook Trail behind my home, I got a bigger “overview”—this project was not just about 2 mid-career scientists. Instead I was birthing a program with at its heart an offering of the Gift of Time and Creating a Pause –for mid-career professionals to explore more deeply climate change collaboration and solutions.

What Lisa and Healy inaugurated was just a “prototype” for something larger waiting to be born. I made a commitment to myself then  that I would create and fund this program for 3 years, then analyze its impact. And the rest, as they say, is history.

–Maggie Kaplan is the Executive Director of Invoking the Pause.