I’ve been incredibly frustrated with myself recently because I realized that I don’t make eye contact with people that I pass by when walking. In fact, I often actively try not to look at them by checking at my phone, coughing into my sleeve, suddenly becoming interested in the building on the other side of the street, etc., and it’s a bad habit. I don’t think that I’ve always been this way – I just started to notice it recently, since coming to college. I think it’s probably at least in part because of living in Taipei, Taiwan for a year; practically every person I walked past in the city stared at me because I’m so obviously foreign, and so I stopped looking at them and instead kept my eyes firmly cast forward.
The problem is that now, unless I know the person, I don’t make eye contact with anyone I walk past. And I’m realizing that it’s important to look someone in the eye and smile, say “Hello!”, or wave – even, and perhaps especially if you don’t know them. I really admire people who say hi to strangers, mostly because when someone does it to me, the exchange never fails to make me feel a bit warmer and more content with myself and my day. I began to realize recently that when I avoid meeting eyes with an unknown passerby and I can tell that they’re looking at me, it probably makes me seem cold and arrogant.
So why not change?
Today as I walked back from the gym, I decided to do a little experiment. I made a point to look every person I walked past in the eye (and hold the gaze until I walked past and it would get awkward), just to see what they would do. I passed probably 30 people (I should have counted, oh well), and an overwhelming majority of them actively looked away from me – I could easily tell that they were aware that I was looking at them, but they looked off in the other direction, or just kept their gaze straight ahead. Their avoidance could have been because I was sweaty and nasty from my work out, but I doubt it – and I couldn’t help but feel disheartened with every averted gaze.
There were a few successes, though.
I passed one woman just after she had plopped down on a bench and heaved a sigh. She shook her head slowly at me, and I responded with a sympathetic frown. Basically we were both agreeing “it’s fucking hot” (at least I assume that’s what our exchange meant, considering it was 100 degrees when I was walking back around 3:30pm, and she looked uncomfortable and overheated). The moment was over quickly, and I moved on. But I enjoyed it because we shared a connection, however brief and unimportant.
Finally, one guy actually smiled and gave me a little wave. This made me so happy that I found myself walking a bit springier for quite a while afterwards. I had no clue who that guy was, and he didn’t know me. He just saw me smile at him, and so he responded with a little hello. It was great.
After my experience today, I’m going to try as hard as possible to make eye contact with the strangers I pass every day. Obviously there are going to be days when I’m in a particularly bad mood, or have something heavy on my mind, or I have to talk on the phone while I’m walking, but I’m still going to do my best. And considering that most of the people I passed during my mini social experiment avoided my eye, I think that lots of my neighbors, colleagues, and fellow world citizens should probably also make an effort to increase their friendly eye contact with others. That little moment of human connection really could brighten up someone’s day, even if it doesn’t seem significant enough to do so.
melrlite 