Distant together

A friend once told me that the way to walk busy city streets was to fix your gaze ahead, focused on exactly where you wanted to go. With such an eagle-stare, sidewalk pedestrians would part to create a path.

I tried it and it works.

You just have to imagine you’re the only one there – or at least the only one who matters.

That method might work today, when our social distancing is giving us a force-field, like a ring of electrons two meters from the nucleus of our bodies.

But this time it’s different: we’re seeing everyone else.

Every supermarket step is a negotiation. A glance and a dance. A smile and a pause.

Instead of seeing only what we want, we are seeing others – and knowing what they want.

We’re bending and allowing. We’re graceful.

What we’re practicing is a kind of love – a realization that we are them and they are us; that we are one, in this together doing the best we can.

Never has humanity seemed better.