When Was the Last Time You Were Seen?
When was the last time you were seen? When was the last time someone looked into your eyes, the last time anyone paid attention to what they saw there?
When was the last time you were heard? When was the last time you finished a thought or a point without someone taking a breath in anticipation of what they would say in return, or even worse, interrupting you?
Conversely, when was the last time you saw someone?
When was the last time you heard someone?
When was the last time no screen distracted you or the person with whom you shared a space?
In this age of “multitasking” and sensory overload, I feel that we have sacrificed quality for quantity. We are inundated with images and sounds, both actual and electronic, but rarely do we look at any of them or listen to any of them with any sort of mindfulness. As we go about our days, a tepid Starbucks in one hand and our phones in the other, we might register the single butterfly as it flits past, but more often than not, we miss the other ten our twenty or hundred accompanying it on its way south. We hear the music, but we miss the lyrics. We notice we need a jacket for the cooler days, but we miss the person who shows up for work without one every day and how she jogs huddled with her hands in her pockets to the door and how her clothes are a bit the worse for wear despite being crispy pressed. We hear the elderly neighbor’s “Fine. How are you?” but we miss the tremor in her voice as she mentions during the conversation that her daughter won’t be coming for Thanksgiving this year. Maybe we even miss her saying that she will be home alone for the holiday. We never wonder why she’s checking her mail in the cold and the dark just in time for us to get home.
I’ll bet we know what’s trending on Facebook, though. I’ll bet we can name one of the most popular viral videos this week. I know I’ve checked my Facebook feed twice since I started this post. I sometimes have a hard time even listening to myself these days, but my own disconnect is getting better. As I more frequently set my phone down, even when I’m out and about alone and dangerously close to boredom, I sometimes see a world that scares me and saddens me, a world where we fail to see what surrounds us in all its marvelous detail. And in doing so, we miss the tender beauty of our fragile cohabitants on this amazing planet, and we miss the moments of shared sadness and joy and need and triumph that are our humanity. We are losing our ability to recognize the experiences of the people in our lives and with it our empathy and our ability to sit with someone as they share their troubles. The longer we go without seeing what grief or joy looks like or hearing those emotions in another’s voice, the more we lose our ability to recognize and understand it. We begin to fear emotion and the interactions surrounding it, so we avoid them until we are cocooned away from the danger of another’s feelings, but we are trapped with our own. Along the way, we forget that others suffer, too, and others overcome. Along the way, the shared experience of humanity is lost, and so are we.
We are becoming people alone not just in crowds but at tables full of others we claim to know and who would claim to know us. We are becoming seen but not noticed, heard but not understood. We are a Facebook status or an Instagram story that shows smiles and selfies with half a dozen people whose feeds show a different angle, but the feeds don’t show the conversations that were never had and the news that was never shared. They don’t show the empty spaces between the hearts of the people smiling so broadly.
Please understand that I’m not saying I never pick up my phone at the dinner table, that I always give the person in front of me my full attention. This change on which I’m working is a work in progress, but I believe it’s one of my most important ones. So I’m leaving my phone in my purse more often than not when I’m out to dinner, and I’m studying the faces at the table with me. I watch to see if tears brim or the belly laugh goes all the way up to the eyes. I watch the people at the coffee shop while I wait on my latte, and I wonder what they’re working on or if the person they’re with is a friend or a loved one or a soon-to-be boss. I listen to my 87-year-old neighbor, and I catch a bit of her optimism when she tells me the pineapple she planted not so long ago will take two years to make a fruit. Sometimes what I see outside the glow of a screen is lovely. Sometimes, it brings tears to my eyes with its splendor.
If you will join me in my endeavor, and your friends will join you, and so on, soon the splendor will blot out the sadness. Will you?
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Unless otherwise noted, all material--written, photographic, and artistic--is the original work of Estora Adams. All rights reserved.
There’s a lot going on in this one photo, not the least of which is a black lab taking himself for a walk. His little sister is on the leash their person carries.