During a particularly worrisome week recently, filled with personal concerns, one of my spiritual teachers told me to go down to the river every day for a walk. He said I should find a “sit spot”, the same one daily, take off the headphones and tune into my senses. His idea was that I should feel, smell and even taste the environment around me. I live by the Hudson River in a quaint little town, so the walk is not far.

The walk is always needed, especially for someone who works at home. Being by a water body is always so healing, so calming.

My walks are not every day because New York weather in the summer being what it is, but the days I can do this have become meaningful.

The first walk after my edict to do so, I sat on a bench at a nearby park on an outcropping on the shore of the river. I noticed a bird, not a seagull, a crow, crowing. It would not stop. I spoke to myself and took notes to report to my therapist. Maybe it was calling to a friend? I wondered what it was concerned with. Soon after another bird came to it, seemingly saying “come on, let’s go”, and the two crows were on their way. And so was I.

The next day I sat at a different bench. Two men who identified themselves as Vietnam Vets were taking a walk and chatting and stopped for a chat with me too. That was nice. Another day a woman with her two tiny dogs made a necessary stop by me at a different bench. I felt sad, I wasn’t wanting any company that day. I had tears rolling down my face, but when those dogs came to visit me and I pet one and chatted with their owner, something healed in me, and the rest of my day felt easier.

The next day, I sat somewhere else entirely, and that’s where I saw an unworried flock of seagulls. There were so many of them. They were amongst the mandrakes in the river. A few went up onto the shore, and I wondered if the whole lot of them would follow, but they did not.

They were unbothered.

The birds have their own agenda, just sitting in or near the water, closing their eyes as they floated or sat on the shore, feeling calm with all of their surroundings and their friends and the wavy water that unmoved them. Then I thought, I need to be more like the birds, unbothered and unmoved, even when someone tells me “come on, let’s go”.

And I remembered, knowing and unknowing are both fine, you can’t control anything, you can’t always get ahead of what’s going to happen, it’s fate.

So the birds taught me, I am okay today.