AmbientAttentionYogaDayFour
From UoWiki
This one was really hard. In the morning, it wasn't so bad. The 'eyes down' moment at the first escalator is becoming automatic. But come Friday night, I'm knackered, I haven't got anything undemanding to read and I haven't the strength to cope with all that slosh and wash of humanity around me. I'm almost craving a portal to disappear into, and several times I catch myself staring at the verts for their promise of salvation.
On a more cheerful note, I realise I've given money to charity collectors twice this week, and I never normally do that. One in particular struck me - an old guy at Old St Tube, wearing a home-made laminated billboard that begged us to 'help save the last (can't remember the number but around 4,000) wild tigers!'. There was something so sincere about his approach (low-fi and determined) that it was infectious.
It occurred to me that I normally screen charity-collectors out as 'demands for money' on the same basis as verts, for all that there are subtle differences (well, not so subtle really).
Feel like I'm getting ill. Wondered why I've not had a Tube-book with me this week - perhaps it's a masochistic wish to make my tube-vert fast still more difficult. Wondered whether too much humanity in close proximity can make you ill if unused to it (like too much rich food perhaps...?), and whether in fact the verts take advantage of that to mop up the spare attention individuals divert from human contact so as to protect their fragile integrities. Certainly I feel like I'm dissolving right now.
But on those rare occasions when there's a Tube platform or escalator with no ads, the feeling is miraculous, like being free of a heavy load. I find myself staring around me with an idiot grin on my face at the textures of a real environment unmediated and unadorned by promises of 'a better life elsewhere'. Even the brushed steel surfaces they stick posters on seem beautiful, simply because they do not refer relentlessly to something elsewhere.
