What Are Your Eyes Saying?

Eyes are the window to the soul.  That's not a new concept but it became more real to me in 2020 as COVID started to to impact our lives.  Let me set the stage for my writing on this topic.

I grew up as an American in Colombia, South America.  Because our family lived for many years in Colombia, my Dad once said to me, "As hard as we try to melt into the Latin culture, we will never be Colombian.  But we will never again be just American."  I was caught between two cultures and I'm very grateful for that upbringing, to have first-hand experience from within another culture, in addition to having the pride I feel for being an American.

So, I speak from experience when I say, "Colombians speak with their eyes."  While it's an unspoken trait among its people, I doubt any Colombian would refute that.  Because I so identified with the Colombian culture, I believe it's a trait I picked up.  I even penned a short, hypothetical story about it while in Peru working some years back.

Now that I've set the stage for my premise of this blog, you will better understand why I felt it so important to write my thoughts on this topic.

On New Years Day, 2020, I recall saying to a colleague, "2020 is a metaphor for great vision.  This year has all of the promise of new horizons."  Then March arrived like a bowling ball in a china shop.  Very quickly, we were thrust into quarantine, mask-wearing, our businesses suffering mandatory closures, work moved to our dining room tables, schools scrambled to establish best practices to teach via the internet, company transfers were put on hold, air travel grounded, grocery store shelves emptied of toilet paper (still trying to make sense of that one) making us think that food chains may be next, all in an effort to determine how wide spread this was going to be and how we should respond to curtail the spread.  Most of us responded somewhere between reserve and panic.

When we did begin to venture back out, after some weeks of seclusion, we were met with Xs on grocery store floors forcing us to "social distance," a phrase not previously part of our daily vocabulary.  So, there we were, in stores, with masks, standing at least six feet from each other.  Some stores even put arrows on their floors making isles one way to prevent people from walking by each other unnecessarily.  For those of us who are extroverts, this was difficult.  It took only a short few weeks before the walls began to close in on us.  Whether you require social interaction or not, this type of imposed seclusion became problematic, more than we realized, because we are not created to be secluded from each other.

When I entered a grocery store in early June, 2020, I noticed a phenomenon that I had never seen before.  As I passed masked individuals, they turned their bodies, or at least their heads, and certainly their eyes in the opposite direction, as if, by looking at me, they may contract COVID.  At first, I thought it was just me being hyper sensitive so I paid closer attention.  After all, given what I said above, I work hard to look people in the eyes and greet them, mask or no mask.  Now, I was even more diligent to connect eyes with others.  The same behavior by others was repeated again and again.  This began to concern me and, clearly, I've given it a lot of thought.

We brought much of our seclusion on ourselves with this self-imposed behavior.  We gained our distance but lost our touch.  A gaze into someone's eye was all we had yet we were giving that away as well.  Without a look into other's eyes, we had no way of communicating a simple "good morning."  All of our civility was gagged behind our masks.

Now that we are a year into this, I think of those who desperately need a hug, a word of encouragement, a mentoring  affirmation, or just a genuine "Good Morning."  What a difference that may make and may have made to those who were enduring a very lonely year.  I wonder who we might have saved by communicating, with our eyes, that we cared.

While I'm not advocating that it's time, yet, to shed our masks, or to randomly embrace a stranger, I would like to make a suggestion.  It's time to make a concerted effort to reconnect with people.  While our masks, along with our fogged glasses, aren't going away anytime soon, we can connect with our eyes.  While our verbal greetings may not be intelligible behind our masks, our eyes are fully capable of letting people know that we care, letting them know that we see them, letting them know that we are okay with returning to civil, human behavior.

I pray today that you will find someone who needs that human touch and that, whether you utter a word to each other, your gesture of looking them straight in the eye, nodding your head as if to say, "hello" will be enough for them to feel touched, to feel loved, to feel embraced, if even just through our eyes.

Meritant Real Estate serves all of Middle Tennessee but our forte is Williamson County.  We work hard to earn our name, Meritant, which simply means, worthy.