Heroes Not Zombies

I’m quite a fan of benches. I’ve got several photos of different benches I’ve come across over the years, usually when they are in a quiet place, under trees, or, facing a wonderful scene, like looking over a valley, off to mountains, or across a lake or the sea.

It’s not that I frequently feel the need to sit down. It’s that a bench is always an invitation to pause.

When I worked as a GP in Edinburgh we had two surgery premises, one in Portobello, and the other up near Cameron Toll. So pretty much every day I’d be driving between the two places, and my favourite way to go was through Holyrood Part. I’d pass a bench at the side of the road. There might be somebody sitting on it, or it might be empty, but, invariably I’d look at it with a sense of longing….thinking, if only I had time to just pull up here, and sit there for a few minutes. Of course, I never did. I was always rushing to get to the next patient, or to start the next clinic.

It’s important to pause. It’s really important to step out of the flood of demands and habits which keep us in a kind of autopilot through the average day. And the best way to do that is just stop. Just stop for a bit. You don’t have to learn to meditate, but you can do that in your pause if you want. But what actually helps is to simply interrupt the automatic pilot, stop, observe, reflect and contemplate.

It’s refreshing and it brings you back into the real world of the present moment, away from all the ruminations and hoped for, or feared, anticipations.