The bench at the second stream

There is a bench on the walk I do most often, about two kilometres in, just past the second of the three small streams the path crosses. The bench was put there by someone, decades ago — there is no plaque, and I have asked at the office of the natural park and nobody knows who. It is plain wood, weathered to grey, and it sits on a small patch of cleared ground beside the stream. There is space for two people. It is almost always empty.

I sit on it for fifteen minutes every walk. I started doing this about three years ago. Before then I would walk to the bench, register it as a landmark, and keep walking. Now I sit. The fifteen minutes have changed the shape of the entire walk, and they have changed, I think, a small part of how I am in the rest of the day.

What fifteen minutes of stream does

It slows the breath. This is not a metaphor. The breath, when you sit beside running water for fifteen minutes, slows in a way that is measurable. I have not measured it, but I have felt it, and I have read enough about heart-rate variability and parasympathetic recovery to trust the felt sense. Running water is something the nervous system reads as a safe signal. Sitting beside it is sitting in a kind of low-grade therapeutic environment that is freely available and that most of us walk past.

I also see things. A heron once, very still, on the opposite bank, which I would not have seen if I had been walking. Two water voles, twice in the last year, which apparently are now rare in this area. A kingfisher, once, the flash of blue that I had only ever seen in photographs. All of these I would have walked past.

What I do during the fifteen minutes

Nothing in particular. I do not meditate, exactly. I do not journal. I sit. I watch the water and the bank and the trees on the opposite side. I let my mind do what it wants, which is, for the first three or four minutes, usually to list the things I need to do later, and then, slowly, to fall quiet.

By minute eight or nine the mind has usually stopped listing. By minute twelve I am sometimes thinking about nothing at all, which I had not known was possible for me. By minute fifteen I have to make a small effort to stand up and continue the walk. The bench has, by then, become the destination, and the rest of the walk is the return.

The bench is a habit. The stream is a teacher. The fifteen minutes are the lesson.

If your walk has a bench, sit on it. Fifteen minutes. No phone. Let the place have its conversation with you.