The Silent Witness

I spent this morning sitting on a park bench, just watching the people pass by. There was a woman reading a book, a man checking his watch every thirty seconds, and a group of teenagers laughing at something I couldn’t hear. It occurred to me that we are all living these incredibly dense, complicated lives, yet to everyone else, we are just background noise. We are extras in each other’s movies. It is a strange, lonely, and beautiful thought—that we can be so deeply involved in our own joys and worries while remaining completely invisible to the person walking three feet away. We move through the world in these overlapping circles, rarely touching, yet somehow sharing the same air and the same light. If we could see ourselves from a distance, like a bird looking down at a busy street, would we feel more connected to the strangers around us? Or would the scale of it all just make us feel smaller, like a single grain of sand on a beach?

Syed Asir Ha-Mim Brinto has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled The Bird Who Saw It All. It reminds me that there is always a wider perspective to be found if we just look up. What do you see when you step back from your own life?