Harper-Thames on an unplanned lesson in stillness courtesy of one deeply unbothered bird
I spotted a heron standing perfectly still near the water’s edge on my usual evening walk, and instead of continuing on my normal route as planned, I stopped, and then somehow ended up following it, at a respectful distance, for a genuinely embarrassing twenty minutes straight.
How This Actually Started
I just wanted one decent photo, honestly, something a bit more interesting than my usual river shots, and herons have this wonderful stillness that makes them genuinely difficult to photograph well because they simply refuse to do anything remotely dramatic on command.
The Bird’s Approach To The Entire Situation
Completely unbothered by my presence, moving at its own unhurried pace along the shallows, occasionally freezing entirely for what felt like several minutes at a time while apparently deciding whether a fish was worth the effort of actually catching.
What Twenty Minutes Of This Actually Taught Me
I am, generally speaking, a rush-through-everything sort of person, always moving toward the next thing on some invisible mental list, and watching a bird commit that fully to doing absolutely nothing for extended stretches of time was genuinely, unexpectedly grounding in a way I hadn’t anticipated when I first stopped walking.
The Moment It Actually Caught Something
After what felt like an eternity of stillness, one sudden decisive strike, and the whole twenty-minute wait suddenly made complete sense, the patience paying off in a single swift movement that I very nearly missed because I’d stopped actively watching for it by that point.
The Photo I Finally Got
Worth the wait, genuinely, catching the exact moment of the strike rather than the long stretches of stillness that preceded it, though I suspect the twenty minutes of patience mattered rather more to the final result than the split second I actually pressed the shutter.
What I’m Taking From This Going Forward
Maybe slowing down occasionally, properly slowing down rather than just walking slightly less quickly, is worth doing more often, even if it means being embarrassingly late for whatever I was originally planning to do that evening.