A few weeks back in New York, I walked the streets and watched. Everyone was looking down, scrolling endlessly through their phones, and in a hurry. It was seldom I would actually make eye contact with anyone, but when I did, I just smiled. There were so many people in one place and yet it felt entirely lonely. People rushing off to their jobs, running late, trying to get from Point A to Point B without anyone getting in their way. They were so busy scrolling through people’s moments on social media that they were missing the beauty and hustle in front of them. How often are we missing life’s moments because our eyes are down looking at other’s happening on social media? If the world was blind, how many people would you impress? No, really, how many people would speak about who you are as a human beyond what you, your work, your Facebook page, or your house looked like? It’s easy to focus on the exterior, it’s our nature and it’s faster than learning the conditions of one another’s hearts.
Being in an visual industry, it’s all about curation and perfection and putting your best work forward. “Show the kind of work you want to shoot,” they say, but sometimes it’s important to show the work that just simply moves you, whether or not people will understand it or it will get pinned on Pinterest a hundred times. (Also, for the sake of grammar, can we please pretend this quote ends with a question mark? I put each little letter in their spot and realized I wasn’t given the proper punctuation to finish the sentence…) I’ve been thinking about us and our human hearts and how we so often use visuals to hide how we are feeling on the inside. It’s easy to hide behind pretty pictures or bury ourselves in work but it’s seldom that we sit down face to face and ask someone how they are doing and really listen.
Yesterday on the plane right home from Dallas, I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was put my head on that tray in front of me (of course I was in the lucky middle seat!) Instead, I took the time to talk to the two people next to me: one woman was heading to a conference to speak about human trafficking in Wisconsin and one older gentleman who used to shoot video for the Discovery Channel until he got a heart condition. The might not have been people I would normally have gotten the chance to know but by the end of the flight the woman gave me a hug and a business card and the man had let me borrow his brand new pillow so I could rest my eyes for a few minutes. If the world was blind, if I was blind, I would have been thankful for the chance to hear their hearts, their stories.
We live in such a visual age that we are so worried about appearances, it’s easy to get caught up we forget what really matters. We “pin” away at the things we want to look like, the things we must purchase, the projects we need to do, and the checklist a home has to have in order for us to buy it. We pin, pin, pin and forget to look at the insides, we forget to smile to just smile, to ask people how they are doing and actually sit and wait for a response. We forget that sometimes there is more to the story, that there is more beyond what is seen, and that maybe, just maybe, God placed these people into your life at this very moment for a reason. True character happens in the things you do when nobody is looking. Who are you worried about impressing? Chances are they might be so worried about impressing others that they are failing to be impressed by your “perfect” and curated life. Let’s get down to the real matters, the heart matters. At the end of the day it isn’t what we look like or what we have, it’s about how we have changed lives and how we have made people feel.
