The Space Between Us
I was standing in the grocery store line this morning when a little girl behind me started playing peek-a-boo through the gaps in the checkout divider. Every time I turned around, she would duck behind her mother’s coat, only to peek out again a second later with a wide, nervous grin. It was such a fragile, fleeting game. We live our lives constantly trying to be seen, yet there is something so honest about the instinct to hide. It is a way of testing the air, of deciding if the world is safe enough to step into. We all have that hidden part of ourselves—the part that wants to reach out but stays tucked away, waiting for the right moment to emerge. It makes me wonder how many beautiful connections we miss simply because we are too afraid to let our guard down, or because we are waiting for someone else to notice we are there. What does it take for you to finally step out from behind your own walls?
Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this exact feeling of gentle hesitation in his beautiful image titled Shy. It reminds me that sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones told in silence. Does this image bring back a memory of someone you once tried to reach?
