The bench is in the corner of the park where the path bends and the trees are tall enough to make a room. I found it three years ago and have returned with something close to regularity since, which is the nearest I usually come to devotion.
It is not a remarkable bench. It has no plaque, no dedication. It has been here long enough to develop the quality of having always been here, which is all most things need to seem permanent.
I sit here for between twenty and forty minutes, depending on the weather and what I have with me. I bring a book on days when the mind is restless, and nothing on days when it will settle. The book is a destination; emptiness is a practice. The difference is what kind of attention you have available.
The park changes around the bench in ways I have been monitoring without intending to. A chestnut tree came down in the storms two winters ago, thirty metres to the left. The gap it left has been filling slowly — first with light that hadn't been there before, then with bramble, then with the beginning of what may become a hawthorn.
Two dogs have attached themselves to this section of the path over the years: a very old golden retriever whose name I have been told twice and cannot retain, and a younger black one of unclear parentage who regards all visitors with a focused, assessory stare, as though building a file. I am presumably in the file by now.
The quality of this particular corner is that it is sheltered without being enclosed. The noise of the park arrives at a reduced volume, softened by the trees. Children and their specific urgency are present at a remove. The sense is of being near the world rather than in it — present enough to watch, far enough to think.
I have made several decisions after sitting on this bench, though none of the decisions was made on the bench itself. They were made later, at home, after the sitting. The bench is where the thinking happens. The decision comes afterward — once the bench has done its work and the mind, having been temporarily relieved of the necessity of producing anything, has settled into what it actually wants.
I do not own this bench. Several other people visit it with a regularity that suggests they feel similarly about it. We have never spoken. We nod when we pass. There is a form of mutual understanding in this that does not require explanation and would be diminished by it.