There is a person sitting on the long wooden platform beside the water, and she has done nothing for twenty of my minutes, which is a good portion of my whole life, and she does not seem to know it.
She has a warm brown drink in a paper sleeve. She lifts it, sips, sets it down, looks at the ducks. Then she does it again. Again. I hovered close to hear if she was in some private rapture, some ceremony that justified spending light this way, and I heard her sigh and say to no one, "I could sit here all day."
All day. She said it like a small thing. Like there would be more days stacked behind this one, a whole silo of them, and she could pour this afternoon out on the grass and not miss it. I have watched the light go from white to gold across the surface of the water once.
Once. It was the most enormous thing that has ever happened. She has seen it, she tells the ducks, "a hundred times," and she says the number the way I would say "a crumb."
She is not wasting the bench. I want to be clear: the bench is warm, the drink is warm, the light is on her face, and a person keeping still inside all that is not idle, she is drinking it. I only wish she knew she was.
So finish the drink. Watch the gold arrive on the water and understand it will not arrive twice, not really, not this one. And when your legs are ready, get up. You have thousands of these.
Do not sit through them.