There was a brief moment today, and I'm talking of nothing more than a flicker of time, when I felt so utterly weary I wondered how exactly I was going to continue to climb the stairs I was on. I suppose it's a point when the body is drawing on a new set of reserves of fuel as one tank has been emptied, and the connection has not quite been made on the new pipeline. When I first started fasting, and I'm referring here to some years ago, such moments tended to be more plentiful than they are these days, though just as mercifully fleeting. I suppose the body fits itself to its intimate knowledge of the new circumstances it finds itself in.
Those moments of weariness are extremely precious. They are tiny windows into what it must be like for those for who fasting is not a voluntary activity pursued for a set number of hours that end, inevitably, in replenishment. You learn a little (and I mean a little) about the extremes such folk must face through sharing a tiny amount of one such extreme with them. A kind of soft echo of the loud shouting that constantly assails them. I'm mindful here of the ending of Gaiman's (and P. Craig Russell - I must not forget the artist) wonderful story Ramadan in The Sandman series in which, if I remember rightly, (and I haven't got the book with me as it's in KL) the boy who is listening to the magical story in a devastated Baghdad finds his fasting easy as food is hard to obtain.
Of course these windows are useless if you only look through them voyeuristically. Hence the association of Ramadhan with the giving of charity. And now I've got to think seriously of how and what to give. And make sure I do give.
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