I sat in a café this rainy morning with my coffee and my thoughts wandering the way they do on slow Sundays. One stroller after another rolled through the entrance, and every single time the parents wrestled with the door on their own. People walked past them, eyes glued to their own worlds, their dopamine machines (for anyone reading this in the future, I mean their phones), never pausing to help. It felt strange. A little heartbreaking. Almost surreal to watch.
I kept wondering if this is what happens when the pace of life sinks its teeth into everyone so deeply that we forget how to look up. Maybe this is what capitalism/technology/a post COVID world has done to us, piling so much on our backs that we forget the softness of small gestures. Or maybe technology has wrapped us so tightly inside our own heads that we do not even see someone struggling to push a stroller through a doorway.
Would this have happened 10 or 15 years ago? I do not know. The world and the people in it seemed so much more accommodating, so much more empathetic. Human. I remember a slower world. A world where doors opened more easily because people noticed one another.
COVID did something to all of us too. A quiet hardening. An invisible distance. I sometimes ask myself if we lost something during those years and never got it back. Something as simple as noticing.
And here is the truth. I never saw any of this before I had a baby. I never noticed how awkward it is to hold a door with one hand while steering a stroller with the other. I never felt that tiny sting when no one helps. Motherhood opened my eyes to the weight of these little everyday battles. Now I see them everywhere.
So here I am, sipping my coffee, asking myself a list of Sunday morning questions. What is happening to us. Why we are drifting farther away from one another. Why something so small feels like such a mirror of who we are becoming.
No answers yet. Just the questions. And this delicious vanilla latte.
-Rome
