Tuesday 31 January 2012

Thumb Twiddling!


Sometimes I come across people whose behavior is out of the ordinary. Someone who stands out and who is easy to remember out of the crowd you walk among very day. One of the reasons I love public transportation is the variety of people gathered in one common place. To be honest I love to just sit and study people on their way somewhere.
In London I prefer to go around by bus. The Tube I mostly find to be a horrible place. It is loud, crammed, warm and smelly. But one thing I like in comparison to other forms of public transportation, is that you walk in to this capsule, a place where you are disconnected from the outside world. I find that even though the train is loud, the Tube has a certain silence that you don’t come across anywhere else in London.

I became aware of this when I man sat down next to me and started to twiddle his thumbs.  As a child I was taught thumb twiddling as a form of occupation. Something you would do only when you are extremely bored and can’t come up with something else.  I was also taught that it is a virtue to find piece within your own boredom instead of trying to repel it.  I guess it is true, that you need to understand boredom in order to appreciate the opposite.

To see this old fashion gesture in a time where people needs constant frivolous or intellectual feeding was beautiful, and it made me smile. It is something I haven’t seen in ages, and probably wont again for long. It was a short escape from reality as he after a while took out his I Phone, which he sat with until he got off. 
But his action made my day, as it triggered my memory to thinking about the time where we were not able to connect with everybody anywhere we went.

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