Who we Walk Past
We all want to be seen.
And that’s what makes walking past someone all that much more hurtful. Walking past without even a single glance (let alone a second one) says, “I don’t see you.” It says, “You don’t matter.”
Which is why I think this is a powerful question that we should be asking ourselves: Who do I walk past? Who do I tend not to see?
Maybe it isn’t intentional. In most cases, I think that’s probably true. We don’t actively set out to ignore people as much as we slowly absorb that they aren’t worthy of our attention. We see how others interact with them and then we tend to model the same behavior, to mold ourselves to the behavior around us. If our mother or father never left small, thoughtful gifts out for the mail delivery person, why would we? If our older brother never spoke to the garbage truck workers even when he was playing catch with us in the alley and they came by, why would we? And if our grandparents never responded when a homeless person asked for money other than to shoo them away, why would we act differently?
The good news is, we can always learn to see the people who have previously gone unseen. In my own family of origin, this was actually anyone who identified as being homosexual. As a child, I had one Aunt who spent the majority of her life in a committed, monogamous relationship with one woman. When the laws in our state permitted it, she married her. Regardless, I was never allowed to spend time with either of them. On more than one occasion, when she and her wife purchased Christmas presents for my sisters and I, their nieces, my mother sent the gifts back unopened. Today that level of “unseeing” makes me see red.
My aunt is no longer living, but I wish I could apologize to her for all the ways my family chose not to see her. As I got older, some of her gifts did make it through. A few books at Christmas, mainly with heartfelt inscriptions in them written from her. One of those was a collection of the works of the author Willa Cather. In the cover of that book, my aunt wrote these words: “Always know you can accomplish great things one step at a time.”
When my second daughter was born, I named her Willa. It turned out that I loved those stories my aunt had gifted me. I’d gone on to major in creative writing in college and to pursue my own work as a writer afterward. In naming my daughter what I did, it’s as if I whispered, “I see you. Even the little things you did mattered.”
Today we keep things like granola bars, bottled water, and hand warmers in the car for whenever we see someone homeless on the streets. I’m trying to teach my daughters to see people, to really see them. There is no greater gift we can give. There is no greater gift we can also receive.
Challenges/Points:
One of the basic human needs is to feel seen by others.
Each of us is raised with some level of not seeing a certain people group. It often isn’t malicious, it’s just a lack of awareness or knowledge.
Once we’ve figured out who it is we tend to walk past, we can be intentional about NOT just walking past. We can make it a point to see them.
Questions:
When have you felt deeply and fully seen?
Who is someone you tend to walk past? Is it a specific person or a general type of person?
How can you go out of your way this week to let someone know that you really see them?
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