I go back to the water

I am near water and my breathing has already changed without being asked. It does this every time, and every time I am surprised, which is its own small evidence about how little I trust the things that work. So I am going to stop calling it a coincidence. It is a lever. It pulls on days I believe in it and on days I do not.

That sound moving water makes, never quite repeating itself. Light on the surface refusing to hold still for a second. A bench, and me on it, and no task attached to either of us. My phone has stayed in my pocket ten minutes, longer than it usually manages.

I know this helps and I still let months go by. Something more urgent is always available, and not one of those urgent things was ever actually more urgent, which I could have told you at the time and did not act on anyway. This is the strangest category of problem I own. It is not that I lack the information. It turns out knowing what works has almost no relationship to doing it, and I keep waiting for the knowledge itself to produce the behavior, which is not a thing knowledge has ever done for anybody.

Ten minutes beside a river does something an hour of trying to relax indoors does not. I do not need the mechanism explained for the effect to keep arriving, and holding out for an explanation is just a respectable way of not going. So the remaining question is not insight. It is scheduling. I had been treating a calendar problem as though it were a wisdom problem, and wisdom was never the missing piece.

So this week I find water. A river, a shore, a fountain in a public square, whatever sits closest to where I already am. Ten minutes on something I can sit on, with no photograph taken and no outing built around it that would need planning and other people and a date everyone agrees to. A place to sit and a quarter of an hour. It goes in the calendar like anything I actually intend to do.

Steadier than I was an hour ago, for the price of a bench. It never takes much, and it never has.