Everyone Around Him Was Looking Down
The World Is Happening. Are You Looking?
Credit: Michael Munson
My friend Michael is a photographer and a personal trainer, which means he pays attention to bodies, to how people hold themselves, to what posture reveals about our inner life. He was standing on a subway platform a few weeks ago when he looked around and saw something.
Every single person around him was looking down.
He took a picture. He posted it. I saw it, and something in my heart hurt.
That image is all of us, isn't it.
What we have quietly, collectively agreed to. We are walking around in our lives, heads bent, eyes down, somewhere else entirely, missing the world that is happening right in front of us, right around us, right inside us.
And we are missing so much.
We are missing beauty. Not the curated, filtered, optimized-for-instagram version of it, but the real thing; which is everywhere, which is relentless in its offerings, which does not require a signal or a subscription.
The way light falls across a street at a particular hour. The face of a stranger carrying something heavy and something tender at the same time. The colors that exist for exactly seven minutes after the sun goes down, colors that have no name, that you will only ever see if you happen to be looking.
We are missing the magnificence of human beings. Every person around us is living an entire life, an unrepeatable, imperfect, specific, extraordinary life, and they are expressing it in the way they walk and dress and laugh and sit with their coffee and hold their children's hands. There is beauty in all of it. There is something sacred in just witnessing it. And when we look down, we look away from all of that. We lose our relationship to the world. We lose our sense of belonging to humankind.
We are missing the awe, and wonder.
The sky. I cannot say enough about the sky. The clouds doing something astonishing that they will never do again in exactly that way. The sun, the stars, the moon going through her phases whether we notice or not, patient and faithful and completely indifferent to our distraction.
The flowers pushing up through sidewalk cracks. The ocean. Lakes so still in early morning they look like something holy. Icebergs calving into cold water. Sunrises that no one asked for and no one earned, just given freely, every single day, to anyone willing to be awake for them.
And the trees. I could write a book about trees. About the way they stand in their own authority. About what they know that we have forgotten. About the particular mercy of looking up into the branches of an old one and feeling, for a moment, like everything is going to be okay.
Nature is our home. Not a backdrop. Not content. Our actual home. And we are barely looking at it.
Looking down prevents noticing.
It prevents the small, important act of paying attention to our own lives. The way things look at different times of day. How morning light is different from afternoon light is different from the blue dusk that arrives just before dark. The food we put in our bodies. Every small thing around us that is asking, quietly, to be seen.
When we are heads down, we cannot be present.
Not for the people we love. We miss the subtleties in their faces, the tiny shifts that tell us something has changed, something is needed, something is being offered that they don't have words for yet. We miss the look in someone's eyes when they say "I'm fine" and mean the opposite. We miss the moment a child does something for the first time and looks up to find us, to make sure we saw, and we didn't see, because we were looking down.
We miss it with our friends, our colleagues, the many beautiful, complicated people we move through our days alongside. The eye contact that says: I see you. I am here. You are not invisible to me.
And worst of all, we give away our presence to ourselves.
This is the one that gets me. Because I think many of us have come to use our phones as a way to not feel what we are feeling, to not hear what our own inner life is trying to say. To stay distracted from the restlessness, the longing, the grief, the clarity that lives just beneath the noise. And all of those things, every single one of them, deserve our attention. We deserve our own attention.
Looking up changes everything.
It allows us to see the world we are actually living in, the beauty and the pain and the suffering and the magic, all of it held together, all of it real. It allows us to stay connected to ourselves and to each other and to the ground beneath our feet.
It allows us to experience joy in the small and the meaningful, in the sounds and shapes and colors that are offering themselves to us every single day. It allows us to observe and to learn and to grow from a world that is constantly, patiently teaching us something, if we would only look.
It connects us to our aliveness.
And I think that is what we are really hungry for. Not more information. Not more content. Aliveness. The felt sense of being here, in this body, in this moment, in this one unrepeatable life.
Look up, my love.
Look up.
The world is right there. It has been there the whole time.
With love, Laura
A few things worth trying: One screen-free walk this week, even ten minutes, with the intention of noticing three things you have never noticed before. Phone in another room for the first and last twenty minutes of your day. And the next time you find yourself reaching for it out of habit or restlessness, pause, look up, look around. The person next to you is living an entire life. So are you.
