💬 My favourite spot to think is a bench with a missing slat

There's a bench 200 metres from my house, at the corner of a small park. I go there to think. It's not a nice bench. 1 slat is missing and the paint came off years ago. A crow lives above it. I started going in 2021, when I was learning to code and everything felt like it wasn't working. I'd sit with my laptop closed and look at the bug in my head, 20 minutes, no screen. Half the time I'd find the problem on the walk back. A missing bracket, a wrong variable name. Once it was a form that wouldn't submit. The field name had a typo and I'd read past it 20 times. I stared at that laptop for 2 hours and saw nothing. On the bench it took 4 minutes. An old man who walks the park every morning nods at me now. I don't know his name. Last winter someone replaced the missing slat with a plank of a different wood. It's lighter than the rest. I was annoyed for a week. I knew exactly where my back went on the old bench. Now the new plank is going grey too. Give it another year and nobody will know. I still go in the evenings, around 7, when the streetlight on that corner finally decides to turn on. I'm on a job hunt now and it's harder than I expected. 2 months, 31 applications, 3 replies. So the bench is busy these days. I go 2 times a day instead of once. The crow has noticed. Nothing gets solved. I just sit there while my head runs. Then I walk home and apply to 2 more. If you see a person with a laptop bag sitting there with eyes closed, say hi. Or don't.

Had a spot like that near my old college, a low wall behind the library where almost nobody walked past. Moved cities for work a few years back and never really found a replacement, every bench near my current place has traffic noise or someone's dog. Might be one of those things you only get to have once in a particular phase of life.

Mine is the steps outside my apartment block around eleven at night after everyone else has gone up, when the building finally goes quiet enough to hear the traffic three streets over instead of the neighbors. Nothing scenic about it at all, just concrete steps and a mosquito coil I keep down there. I have had some of my clearest thinking sitting on those steps.