Little things, full of meaning

Monday morning. Yoga.

I am an intermittent yogist. I kid myself that I go twice a week, but even the most cursory glance at the class ledger would blow that one out of the water.

But that’s fine. Intermittent is better than not at all, and the hour is always well spent. I’m there on the mat, focusing on the yoga – other things take a back seat. There are occasional distractions through the window – a crow or a pigeon, maybe, and once a heron lolloping across the horizon – but mostly the task of summoning the coordination required for the task at hand keeps me amply occupied.

Our teacher, Gingi, is aces. Tall and rangy, with a calming voice, he talks us through the routine while performing it along with us. There are regular exhortations not to push ourselves too far, plenty of easier options specially designed for the faint of fetlock, and above all, permission.

Permission to be terrible, permission to fall over, permission to spend the whole hour lying on your back looking at the ceiling. You’re there in the room, and that’s the main thing.

’Twas not ever thus. I’ve been an intermittent yogist before. The first foray, decades ago now, was scuppered by my own fecklessness. When I came back to it a few years later to combat the onset of back spasms, the transcendent experience of the yoga was more than somewhat undermined by lying, at the end of the class, on a carpet faintly redolent of fag ash and sticky from years of spilled Courage Best.

It’s not like that now. A light and airy space ten minutes’ walk from home, an aces teacher. I really should go more often.

This week’s class, fifteen minutes in. We’ve sat, we’ve stood, we’ve breathed. Honestly, if we spent the hour sitting on the mat just breathing it would be fine for me, but everyone else is triangle-posturing and cat-stretching with the best of them, and those are two of the ones I can do (my triangle posture is executed with a precision of geometry that would have Euclid purring), so I join in.

My rendition of the downward dog might not meet with universal approval, but I can do it without shuddering with exertion or crying in agony, and I’m pacing myself.

So far, so routine.

And then, out of the blue, a moment.

Gingi is doing the rounds, monitoring, intervening gently where necessary.

A hand on the shoulder, coaxing it into a position I suddenly discover I can achieve. He holds it for a second, and then gives me the merest pat on the back, a tiny gesture to change my day.

Perhaps I exaggerate its meaning. Perhaps for some reason I’m overwrought, subconsciously weighed down by the troubles of the world, prone to finding solace in the smallest things. But at that moment this tiny pat on the back somehow contains a world of affirmation, validation, reassurance.

Hello. Keep going. You’re doing fine.

And so, I’m surprised to discover, I am.

They’re the stuff of life, these little pats on the back. More of us should do more of them to more people.

That’s all.

I could expand on it, encourage you to Be The Pat On The Back You Want For The World, but that feels dangerously like Motivational Speaking territory to me, so here instead are a couple of the goldfinches that have been knocking about the place recently. They’re aces too.