🧘 Best quiet spots in the city to just sit and think for a while

Most weekends I try to find somewhere reasonably quiet to just sit for half an hour or so without any particular purpose, no phone scrolling, not really reading anything specific either, just genuinely sitting and letting my thoughts settle after a fairly noisy work week, and over the past year I have slowly built up a small mental list of spots around the city that actually work for this specific purpose without being either too crowded or too isolated to feel comfortable alone. A particular bench near one of the quieter sections of Lumbini Park early on a weekend morning has become my most reliable option, before the usual crowd builds up later in the day, when it is mostly a handful of walkers and someone doing yoga off to one side rather than any real noise or disturbance nearby. There is also a specific corner of a library near my old college that still lets outside visitors sit and read, technically meant for actual studying, but nobody has ever questioned me just sitting quietly there for an hour without a specific book open in front of me either. What I have noticed is that the actual location matters less than I originally expected, what really makes a spot work for this specific purpose is a certain kind of ambient background noise, distant traffic, some birds, other people existing nearby without directly interacting with me, rather than complete total silence, which somehow feels more unsettling than genuinely peaceful whenever I have accidentally found a spot that quiet instead. Coffee shops never quite work for this specific purpose for me personally, too much low level pressure to actually order something and eventually leave once you have finished it, which changes the entire feeling of just sitting there compared to somewhere genuinely free and open like a park bench with no clock attached to it. Does anyone else here have a specific go to quiet spot for this kind of purposeless sitting, and did you find it by accident or were you actively looking for exactly this kind of place at the time?

Completely agree that ambient background noise works better than actual total silence for this specific purpose, I tried sitting in a genuinely empty room once specifically to think and it felt oddly more unsettling than peaceful the whole time. A library corner sounds like a genuinely smart alternative I had honestly not considered myself before reading this, might actually try that one out sometime soon.

Lumbini Park early morning is honestly such a solid specific choice, I used to go there myself before work a couple of years back purely for that same reason, quiet enough to actually think but never fully isolated or unsettling the way total silence somehow becomes after a while. The specific point about coffee shops creating subtle pressure to order and leave eventually really does ring true for me too.