It was late evening at the Terrace Gardens in Richmond, the hour when the light has already gone but the sky has not quite agreed to it yet. I had not gone there for any particular reason. I had simply stopped moving for the first time all day.
Then the birds came over. Cranes, a few of them, low enough that I could hear the effort in them. They were making the most extraordinary racket, a frantic, disordered cacophony, the sound of something that has gone wrong somewhere.
I have known cranes since I was a child. I know the sounds they make when nothing is the matter. This was not one of those sounds. Standing there in the dark, I was quite convinced they had lost their bearings and forgotten the way home.
What happened next took less than a second, though it will take me several paragraphs to explain.
I was five, or perhaps six. It was summer in India, which means the house was unbearable after dark, so the whole family slept on the terrace, as most of the country still does. Mattresses laid out on concrete that was still warm from the day. My father beside me, telling me a story, the way he did every night until I fell asleep.
It was nearly midnight when some birds passed above us, making a strange, urgent noise. I remember asking about it. I remember my father answering quite matter-of-factly that they had lost their way home.
And then he said: let us pray for them.
So we did. Two people on a terrace in the dark, praying for birds we could no longer see. When we finished, he told me (with the complete certainty fathers are able to produce on demand) not to worry, they had forgotten the way, but they would find it soon. Then he went back to his story as though nothing had interrupted it.
I believed him entirely. It did not occur to me to ask how he knew. It did not occur to me that a prayer offered from a terrace could fail to reach a bird.
All of that arrived in the time it took the cranes to cross the space above my head.
And then, without deciding to, I prayed. Silently, briefly, for nothing more complicated than that they be guided safely back to their roost. A fleeting impulse. It cost me nothing and lasted no longer than the thought itself.
I must confess it left me feeling wonderfully serene.
I want to be careful about how I describe this, because nothing dramatic happened. No light fell on anything. It was more like setting down a bag you had forgotten you were carrying, and understanding its weight only by its absence.
It has been a heavy few months. The civil service consulting work is relentless in the particular way consulting is relentless, whole days that belong entirely to other people's problems. Then home, where living alone means the domestic work is one long conversation with yourself. Then the gym, the grinding, physical and mental both.
None of this is a complaint. I chose all of it. But I noticed something in Richmond that I had not noticed before. For months my mind has been travelling along a single narrow line. During the day it thinks about the work. After the work it thinks about me; my projects, my goals, my progress, the things that concern me and the things I believe are owed to me.
And then, for perhaps ten seconds, it went somewhere else entirely. To a bird. Not even a person. A creature that will never know I existed, let alone that a man stood in a garden in south-west London and wished it home.
I felt human. That is the only way I know how to put it. Gratitude arrived without being asked for. Something that had been waiting in my mind for weeks finally left it.
And then, almost immediately, the suspicion.
Because I noticed that I felt good, and the noticing spoiled it slightly. Is this pride? Am I congratulating myself over a prayer that cost me nothing, an act with no witnesses and no outcome I will ever be able to verify? Have I taken a small involuntary moment and quietly filed it away as evidence of my own character?
I am wary of that. Ego and pride are things I do not want in my life, and I am aware that the surest way to invite them in is to begin keeping a record of your own goodness.
I have turned it over for two days now, and this is as far as I have got.
The order of things seems to matter. The prayer came first and the feeling came afterwards. I did not stand there calculating that praying for birds might improve my evening. The serenity was residue, not motive. Pride, I think, would look different. It would look like performing the act in order to produce the feeling. It would look like going back tomorrow to see whether the birds might oblige me again.
And humility, if that is what this was, is not the same as thinking badly of yourself. It is closer to being accurately sized. For ten seconds I was a man standing in the dark beneath creatures I could not help, asking something I cannot prove of someone I cannot see. There is nothing flattering in that. It made me smaller, and the smallness was a relief.
And yet. Even this, even the worrying about pride, is another way of thinking about myself. I set out to pray for a flock of birds and arrived, two days later, at an audit of my own character.
The birds, at least, might genuinely have been lost. The self never is. It always finds its way home.
I do not know whether they were lost. I do not know whether they found the roost. I do not know whether a prayer travels, or where it goes, or whether it was ever really about the birds at all.
A terrace in one country. A terrace garden in another. Most of my life so far in between. I did not notice the symmetry until I sat down to write this.
What stays with me is not the cranes. It is my father saying let us pray for them, and then calmly returning to his story. He did not tell me the birds would be fine because he knew. He told me because a small boy beside him was worried, and because he had somewhere to put that worry. He handed me that, and I did not use it for the better part of my life, and then one evening in Richmond it came back entirely on its own.
My journal from that night has a single line at the top of the page. Prayer makes you humble. I wrote it before I had thought about any of this properly. I am still not certain it is true. But I have not managed to improve on it either.
The cranes flew on. I walked home. I have been quieter since.
Continue the thought