The Walk That Doesn’t Go Anywhere
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Three summers now, across different London parks, though Hyde Park has claimed the last two June gatherings. Hot both times — properly hot, London handling it badly, swans on the Serpentine entirely unbothered by any of us.
Before anything starts, I always explain exactly what we'll do, where, and for how long. Otherwise someone asks how far we're walking, and "nowhere in particular, slowly" is a genuinely annoying answer to give at ten in the morning or under a scorching sun. What I can't hand anyone in advance is what actually happens once we start. That part they just have to trust. Surrender, really, though I try not to say the word out loud too often — it tends to make people nervous, or worse, intrigued in the wrong way.
What I've been pondering since this year's walk isn't really Vipassana, or even why sitting under a tree for long periods of time seems to calm people down quite so reliably. It's why I keep coming back to this. Like me, some familiar faces are returning alongside people who simply spotted an event online and thought, why not?
I suspect that, somewhere along the way, without ever quite setting out to, these walks have become seasonal rituals for me.
Not in the sense that anything ceremonial happens. Nobody has to know how to meditate, believe anything in particular, or arrive wearing linen and carrying crystals. The ritual is simpler than that. We stop. We notice the season we're in. We pay attention to a landscape that has been changing for weeks without asking whether we've been busy enough to notice.
That feels rare when you live in a big city.
Cities have a way of flattening time. One week rolls into the next. Summer arrives when someone complains it's hot on the Tube. Autumn because the supermarkets start selling pumpkins and everyone talks about Christmas. Winter because… Christmas.
Nature, thankfully, has no interest in any of that.
Every walk has ended up taking on the character of the season it happened to belong to. June asks different questions from November. A woodland asks something different from an open park. Even the conversations afterwards seem to change. I don't plan that. I don't think I could.
The practices change too. Sometimes we walk more. Sometimes we barely move at all. Sometimes people want to talk afterwards, sometimes they don't. I’ve no interest in dictating either the experience or the programme, I welcome collaborators (Hi Jen!) and new perspectives. I welcome dogs, partners, families.
That's probably why I never feel the need to persuade anyone to come. I usually forget to advertise them, if I'm honest. The walks are free, donations are welcome, and I'll keep running them a few times a year, because by now they're as much part of the rhythm of ASTERA as they are of mine.
Some people come once and leave with a quieter mind than the one they arrived with. Others come back every season, curious about what has changed since the last time. Both seem like perfectly good reasons to spend a day outside.
If nothing else, I hope they offer a gentle reminder that paying attention to what is already in front of you is a practice. Like any practice, it becomes easier the more often we return to it.
The swans, for what it's worth, will almost certainly be there again next year. Whether they continue to ignore us quite so expertly remains to be seen.
