generic pause/wait?

There is no such thing as a generic wait function. If you have done something and you want to wait for example for a minute before doing something else or resuming, you use the setTimeout(function,timeout) function.

This has though some impact in how you break up your code into function. I assume you want to do something like that - in pseudo code:

myfunction() - definition:
- do thing A();
- wait(1 minute);
- do thing B();

...

myfunction()  - invocation

The myfunction() construct has to be broken up into two pieces(*):

var myfunctionPartA = function() {
  code that does the A()-thing
  setTimeout(function(){
      myfunctionPartB();
    },60000); // after 60 secs invoke ...partB
};

var myfunctionPartB = function() {
  code that does the B()-thing
};

myfunctionPartA(); // invocation

In case you have first to do something A(), then do something else and repeat it every minute until a condition is met, and then - finally - something B(), the construction looks like this:

var myfunction = function() {
  code do the A()-thing;
  myfunctionRepeatPart();  
};

var myfunctionRepeatPart = function() {
  code that does the repeat thing;
  if (conditionNotMetYet) {
      setTimeout(function(){
        myfunctionRepeatPart();
      },60000); // after 60 secs invoke repeat-thing again
  } else {
    code that does the B()-thing
  }
};

myfunction(); // invocation