The Bench We Somehow Know
Back in December, I found myself quietly creating a kind of personal memorial—not to loss, but to the contemplative life itself. The image I received stands in gentle contrast to the noise and spectacle we so often ingest—less like something that animates us, and more like something that settles us. And yet, like those roaring crowds in a stadium, it carries its own quiet intensity. It gathers and concentrates a feeling. It invites us to pause long enough to recognize what we’ve always valued, but too easily overlooked. It steadies us. It returns us, quietly and without force, to our own center.
On the southern end of Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina, looking out toward Masonboro Inlet, I received a photograph of an empty bench facing the wide openness of sea and sky. I wasn’t trying to take or capture anything, but to receive what was already offering itself—standing still long enough for the universe to speak first. I returned to that bench again and again—different light, different angles—drawn not by novelty, but by a quiet insistence. It was the bench that held me there. The bench that kept asking for my attention. Over time, it began to feel less like an object and more like a small shrine to stillness, to integrity, to tenderness.
We are given endless encouragement to live loudly. There is always somewhere new to go, something more to become, someone else we’re supposed to be chasing after or becoming worthy of. But at sixty-eight, I find myself no longer compelled by all that urgency. Not in resistance, exactly—but in recognition. That perhaps our deeper calling is not to keep moving, but to stay. To stay long enough for our eyes to soften… and to finally see the beauty of what has been here all along, waiting for our full attention.
This isn’t a rejection of ambition or growth. Nor is it a dismissal of that inner tug that calls us forward. But so much of our lives are lived leaning into the future, that we rarely allow ourselves to fully inhabit the present. And the present—quiet, ordinary, easily missed—is where so much of the richness actually lives.
Some days, the highlight is as simple as grabbing a couple of my cameras and wandering through the streets of my own hometown, receiving whatever moments of urban life choose to reveal themselves. Or a walk down to Camino Bakery for a cinnamon bun, a loaf of bread, or a good Caffè Americano. Then back home. Lying on the bed with Heidi, listening to a favorite podcast. Letting the mind wander a bit. Letting certain thoughts rise and settle. There are still things within us that need tending—some that simply ask to be felt, others that invite a deeper looking. It may sound like idleness from the outside. But in truth, it is a kind of quiet discipline—a way of returning ourselves to sanity, to balance, to contentment.
And yet, after all of this—the wandering, the small pleasures, the quiet disciplines—it is the bench that remains. The bench we have not sat on, and yet somehow know. The bench that waits without asking anything of us.
It begins to feel less like an object and more like a place within us—our true home—the place we have slowly drifted from through unbridled ambition and quiet forms of workaholism. And perhaps we will reach what we have been searching for, and finally understand where we have been all along, not by going farther, but by returning—again and again—to that place.
To sit, without distraction or self-reproach. To feel the breeze move across your face, asking nothing of you. To hear the soft rhythm of waves meeting the shore—arriving, receding, arriving again—without urgency, without demand. To notice the way light shifts across the water. The way the body begins to soften when there is nothing it has to prove.
To let the mind settle where it is, without chasing or correcting. To allow what is unfinished in you to simply be, for now. To rest your attention on what is given, rather than what is missing.
To sit long enough that the need to go somewhere else begins to loosen its grip. Long enough to remember that this—this moment, this breath, this simple awareness—is not a detour from your life, but the very ground of it.
And to recognize, gently, without fanfare, that you are already home.
