Last week at Friday prayers at the mosque on the Hill I found myself sandwiched between two little lads for the congregational prayer. Now something non-Muslims may not realise (I didn't when I was one) is how physical the prayers are when praying alongside others. I mean praying shoulder to shoulder means you get really close and personal, especially in the sort-of-seated positions. You don't have space to yourself and, of course, this is an important part of the greater meaning of the whole experience. You're definitely not alone and that's an inescapable fact.
Anyway, praying alongside the boys was a powerful reminder of how fidgety kids are. Both of them were doing their best to maintain the necessary stillness when standing, bending, kneeling and the like, but were failing quite spectacularly. I found myself envying them their inability to contain the abundance of life they each contained and was reminded of the admonition I regularly heard as a youngster, part question, part accusation: Why can't you keep still?!
Now I can keep still, but something has been lost, and I was glad those kids still had that something.
2 comments:
I had a conversation the other day about how twitching and fidgeting are the main things that make moving human figures look real, and how the lack of inefficient movement is totally unnatural. That we twitch less as we grow older is probably a learned behavior, and children seem to twitch more. My friend recounted how a company of actors looking to stage 'Lord of the Flies' went to observe a class of schoolboys, and the main thing they noticed was that they twitched a lot more.
A nice bit of observation there. I remember years back teaching eleven-year-olds and finding their twitching quite disturbing when first teaching them on their arrival in secondary school. But it seemed to fade in the second half of their first year in school. Either that, or I got used to them.
Post a Comment