Walking Home Along the Liffey After the Longest Day of the Week

Thursdays are the long ones. I do not know why it is always Thursday, but it is. By the time Thursday evening comes, the week has used me up and I have not yet reached the weekend that might give me back.

For years I would stand at the stop on Westmoreland Street, waiting for the bus, carrying the whole day on my shoulders like wet laundry. Then one Thursday the bus did not come, and I walked. I have walked ever since.

The Route

It is nothing special, which is the point. I go down to the quays and turn east, with the river on my left. Past the Ha'penny Bridge, lit up and a bit ridiculous and lovely. Past the boardwalk where the teenagers sit. On toward the Beckett Bridge, which looks like a harp lying on its side, as if someone set it down to rest.

It takes me about forty minutes. By the end, something has changed.

What the River Does

I think it is the direction of it. The Liffey is going somewhere, always, toward the bay and the sea at Howth and beyond. Walking beside it, I feel the day begin to go with it. The meeting that went wrong. The email I should not have sent. The thing my sister said on the phone.

None of it is solved. It is just carried a little way off.

You cannot fix a long day. But you can walk it to the water and let it go on without you.

A River Poem

Brown water under the green bridge,
the gulls doing their sums,
a cyclist ringing at nobody.
I give the river one worry per bridge,
O'Connell, Butt, Talbot, Beckett,
and by the last one
my hands are empty
and the evening is mine.

How to Try It

You do not need a river. Any long, straight walk with somewhere at the end of it will do. But if you are in Dublin, here is what helps me:

• Leave your earphones in your bag for the first ten minutes.
• Name one thing that went wrong at each bridge, then stop thinking about it.
• Notice one thing that is beautiful before you get home, even if it is only a light in a window.

I still get the bus most days. I am not a fanatic. But on Thursdays, the long ones, I walk the quays. And when I turn up my own road, the day is behind me, somewhere out past the port, heading for the sea.

Cover: Photo by Alessandro Santoro on Unsplash.