Sitting on a Bench for No Reason

Not waiting for anything, not resting from anything, just sitting, which is harder to allow than it sounds.

Benches are everywhere, and we use them almost entirely as machinery. We sit on them to wait for a bus, to retie a lace, to check a map, to recover for a moment before pressing on. The bench is a tool, and we approach it the way we approach all tools, with a task in mind.

The ritual here is to sit on a bench with no task at all. Not waiting, not resting from anything in particular, not on the way to somewhere. Just sitting, because the bench is there and so are you.

The difficulty of doing nothing

It is harder than it sounds. Within about ninety seconds the hand reaches for the phone, simply to have a reason to be there, because sitting without a purpose feels faintly illegitimate, almost like loitering. We have been thoroughly trained to believe that every moment must be accounted for.

Resist the phone, if you can, and something shifts. The restlessness peaks, and then it passes, and underneath it is a surprisingly pleasant stillness. You are doing nothing, in public, on purpose, and the sky has not fallen in.

The view from sitting still

What you get, once you have settled, is the particular vantage of the stationary person in a moving world. Everyone else has somewhere to be. They stream past with their bags and their conversations and their slight frowns of intent, and you, for once, are the fixed point they flow around.

From this fixed point you start to notice things that motion hides. The pigeon's odd sideways negotiation with a crumb. The way the light moves across the buildings as the minutes pass. The small dramas of the street, played out by people who have no idea they are being gently observed by someone with absolutely nowhere to be.

Permission, granted by a plank of wood

Perhaps the best thing about the bench is that it gives you permission. To sit on the grass would be a decision; to stand still in the middle of the pavement would be peculiar. But the bench is an invitation already issued, a small public statement that here, it is acceptable to stop.

So the next time you pass an empty bench and feel, faintly, that you ought to keep moving, consider sitting down instead. Not to wait. Not to rest. Just to be a still point for a few minutes while the day goes by around you. The bench was put there for exactly this, even if almost no one ever uses it that way.