We all know that texting plus walking yields pole in face. But what more can you gain from strolling down the street with an upright head? That, my friends, is the power of eye contact with another human being.
In one respect, the past year for me has been a thrill. Primarily relying on public transportation for my daily commute, working in San Francisco's Mission District and frequenting the Tenderloin has lent itself to a social experiment I didn't know I was even trying to conduct. At some point, having repeatedly walked the same neighborhood blocks, I noticed that I had begun to make eye contact, coupled with a "Hi" or one of those just-genuine-enough lip-pursing smiles at every person whose eyes met my forward gaze. After I became aware of this several months ago, I intentionally continued to lip-purse and eyeball-lock each person I walked past. I also started taking mental notes on different folks' reactions, and I observed a few things.
Folks who aren't likely to own a smart phone are much more likely to look you in the face as you approach them. Not necessarily because they're not staring down at the phone they don't have, but because their consciousness lives ever so slightly less in the the virtual world, and more in the very real world - the realm in which your physically walking past them, however brief, actually impacts that very moment in their day. These folks I get to encounter are often residents of SRO hotels or other supportive housing units, which indicates that they once have or are experiencing extreme poverty in the city. It seems that their daily agendas include a lot more being, and if you know me at all, you know I love the heck out of being. Being in the Tenderloin, being content, being hungry, being with others, and being impacted by another's presence. The thing is, at the end of your life, you won't remember every "Good morning" you exchanged with a coworker or teacher.
But a "Good morning!" morning shared with a stranger is exponentially richer than one in which two strangers' lives will never converge for that moment because eye contact was artfully timed and avoided.
Why is this compelling? Because we do this to ourselves. We often blame economic, political, or market forces at large for income disparities that widely divide our life paths and experiences. We point the finger at our nation's history of racism or factions of people with unprogressive ideologies for socially segregated communities. And all of this, pretty true! But what are we as empathetic human beings doing in real every day life, to pursue communities with more wholeness and solidarity?
Obviously, a chorus of "good mornings" and even friendly street banter won't be the cure-all to un-skew access and privilege in our society. But I'm just here to state the obvious, that at no point in history did systemic injustice spontaneously birth itself and insist that it would stay. Real individuals were the sources of decisions that incrementally divided us the way we find ourselves today in the States. I'm just saying, I bet that we didn't come up as a nation who spent much time empathetically gazing into each other's eyes.
The point is not that forcing eye contact is inherently so compelling an act that you should go do it now. But I do believe that mutually intentional eyeball-locks will undoubtedly increase chances for conversation, which will encourage story-sharing, which will yield more empathetic listeners, from among whom might rise up a generation of advocates whose empathy might turn to sympathy, and who will champion the interests of those radically unlike them.
It's such a small thing, that it feels silly to even blog about it, but I know that eye contact tears down powerful social barriers that we allow to tower over us every single day that we choose not to engage with the low-income mom tiredly herding her kids down the street, or the homeless man sitting and lying on the sidewalk, or the undocumented workers waiting to be recruited for work that day. Eye contact and a smart vocal response tells the guy talking at me as I walk by, that I won't push back (for my safety's sake), but that I won't walk away a voiceless female object either.
I wholeheartedly believe that because we don't really know each other, our claims for each other's interests effect very little change. If we as a generation are passionate about the rights and living standards of disadvantaged people, I consider it a privilege that we would really know them and their stories.
All of this to say - let's choose outside our immediate comfort to love another's experience as much as our own, one "Good morning" at a time.
