Twenty minutes by the water, and nothing else

There is one thing I never charge for and have never put on a workshop programme, and I recommend it more often than anything else I teach: walk slowly by the water for twenty minutes, doing nothing else. No podcast in your ears, and the step counter can wait. You, a pace slower than usual, water beside you.

I live in Marseille, the sea is a twenty-minute tram ride away, and I know perfectly well that helps. I will come back at the end to what you do if you live inland. It took me years to understand why that particular walk puts me back together when the same quarter of an hour on a treadmill does absolutely nothing for me. The slow pace counts for something, the gaze that reaches far counts for more.

What the eye does when you give it room

Add up a day at your desk: did your eyes travel further than an arm's length even once? The screen, the phone, a face on a video call, the sheet of paper beside the keyboard. They stay converged from morning to evening, the small muscles that focus them never quite let go, the neck joins in, and by the evening we put the whole thing down to general tiredness. The seafront offers nothing to fix on. The gaze runs out to the horizon and the focusing loosens. Last January I ran a workshop in a windowless meeting room, fourteen people under strip lights, and I remember thinking that half the benefit of that session came from the quarter of an hour we spent outside afterwards. I see the same thing before my classes at Pointe Rouge: women arrive with a clenched jaw and ten minutes later their shoulders have come down, without my having said a word.

• The horizon line, where one blue becomes another blue. The eye settles there on its own, without being told to.
• The movement of the waves, repeating without ever quite repeating, regular enough to reassure you and unpredictable enough that you do not look away.
• The wash of the water, broad and wordless, with nothing to sell you.
• Wind on the skin, the smell of salt: the body handles that sort of information without going through language.
• Your own feet, now and then, sand giving way, a pebble rolling, the wet ground at the edge that holds so much better.

The twenty minutes, in detail

1. 01Pick a stretch you can walk out and back without thinking. Ten minutes one way, turn around, ten minutes home. Not having to choose the route is part of the rest.
2. 02Phone on flight mode, and put away. Not in your hand, not in a front pocket, in a bag. Nobody is looking for you for twenty minutes.
3. 03For the first three minutes, keep your usual pace and let your head finish its sentence. You do not switch off a busy mind, you wait for it to run itself down.
4. 04Then slow down properly, to a pace that strikes you as faintly ridiculous. If it does not feel too slow, you have not slowed down yet.
5. 05Lay the breath over the step: four steps in, six steps out, through the nose. Does the counting make you tense? Drop it and simply lengthen the out-breath.
6. 06Every two or three minutes, bring your eyes back to the horizon. It is the only genuinely active gesture in the whole practice.
7. 07For the last two minutes, stop facing the water, standing, doing nothing. Then walk home and leave the phone where it is a while longer.

If you do not live by the sea

Someone says it at every corporate session, usually with a half smile: easy for you, you live in Marseille. True, and a bit thin as an objection. You need a surface of water and some depth of field, ideally with a continuous sound laid over the top, and most towns have that somewhere, often ten minutes from your front door. I may well be wrong, but I think the place weighs far less than the decision to produce nothing for twenty minutes.

• A canal or a river: the bank gives you the vanishing line and the current gives you movement. Walk downstream on the way out.
• A lake, a pond, the basin in a park. Less sound from the water, but an open horizon and reflections that shift all the time.
• A fountain on a square. The depth of field is missing, the sound is there: sit down instead of walking, ten minutes will do.
• Failing that, one long straight avenue in a park with a bench at the end. What matters is being able to rest your eyes fifty metres ahead of you.

Twenty minutes in which you produce nothing. That is the part the people I work with find hardest to grant themselves.

What irritates me about the wellness industry is the equipment stacked around it: the app, the mat, the subscription, the matching outfit. Here there is nothing to buy. On a Tuesday in November, in the middle of the day, the Corniche is nearly empty, the water is grey and the wind bites a little. I do not know whether it works for everyone, so try it once this week and come and tell me what state you get home in.