Look. Up.

How much do we miss when we are wide awake?

Go to wherever people bustle and gather. Take a look around and tell me what you see. Do people greet you as you walk down the street? Do you greet people when you walk down the street? Do we exchange a warm smile, a cheeky grin, a knowing nod? Do we even notice each other any more?

How much do we miss as we walk around, faces down? Chin up, they tell us. However, all the people are walking around in this world chin down. There’s no eye contact, no observing, no even noticing each other. We are ghosts staring into a screen, eyes averted. Sometimes we stumble because that light pole pops out of nowhere when you’re checking the score, reading tweets, or Snapchatting while walking. We are stuck in a cycle of connection to all the wrong things. We have forgotten balance.

My OG bloggers friends became my IRL friends. Mac Daddy used to call them my imaginary friends, but now he has met many of them. In most every city we visit around the world we meet up with my blogger friends. We connected online through our writing, our advocacy, and our shared experiences. We nurtured those friendships online and in person over the years. We owe thanks to our screens for introducing us, but we know it is our in-person time together that connected us. And we don’t take that for granted.

As a society, we don’t connect with each other. And we don’t connect with nature like we should, but that’s for another day. We stare down at these little devices, these little computers in our hands where we hold the world, and as we walk the world passes us by. We blink to clear our eyes but we do not see. How can we expect things to look up if we are the ones always looking down?