Eye Contact

A lament for the simplest form of connecting

I love the shift in exercise tempo after my 9 June “Escape From Alcatraz” triathlon.

Back in the ocean, surfing.

Back in the gym, working the joints and sinews to underwrite the years more of surfing…(official life goal to be surfing when I’m 80…).

But both back in both the ocean, and back in the gym, I’ve been noticing something a little sad in our humanity…

One of those “small things that’s a big thing”.

Eye contact.

This simple, gentle human gesture of crossing eyes with someone in the same airspace is slowly dissolving in the mire of our self-oriented technologies.

Most whined-about in children, it’s now bedded in across the vintages.

The ocean, the gym…the streets even…all are communities of us humans doing our thing together in the same space.

Except with one thing fading from our habits and so our experience of life. And, one thing that is perhaps the tiniest bellwether of our ‘mental health’ getting more delicate.

Eye contact.

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A gym used to be… 

So I remember the days when a gym was somewhere full of bubbling chatter and community. 

At school and university and in early career London days, you could go to the gym and end up doing nothing but waxing lyrical with friends and strangers for most of the planned hour. They were the best sessions! Except that you’d have to get back in there the next day to do some proper ‘work’...

Back then, you’d occasionally see a headset the black wires linking ears to hips and a walkman on a belt. But the bloke or gal would seem a little ‘odd’ for pacing around completely in their own little world.  

I remember making friends in the gym in my early career London days. Hanging in the air was the spirit of strangers egging each other on, with a little eye contact and a “nice one” as someone finished a set while you were waiting for the machine. One such moment even turned into a date, after a few weeks, thanks to the little comments shared and…eye contact…

Then a decade later we started seeing the white string of slim plastic cord defining the iPod Touch, on our streets and in our gyms. Not everyone sporting the dangling white cord, but more and more folks with every year.

Then another decade later, the string evolved into the most elegant white piece of plastic that could possibly be an accessory to an ear! So subtly so now that they can’t always be seen. And now almost everyone wearing them…

I notice the corporate messaging of the gym, the words “family” and “nurturing”, and “community” is emblazoned on the gym walls…But for all the energy, the tunes pumping in this boxy room full of exercise toys, the reality is that the gym is no longer really community, nor family, nor nurturing.

It’s a load of people moving around in their own little worlds.

And the tyranny of the white plastic in our ears brings us into community with little but ourselves, and whatever is being piped directly into our eardrums. (I write “our” because I’m in that club on some days too, but they’re not the good days…!)

Think: what family, or wonderful community that you just can’t stop spending time with, would have a gathering where everyone walks around with headphones on?  (Okay, an exception for the “silent disco” concept, which I would bet has a re-visit rate about the same as VR headsets…) 

And, it’s not just eye contact that’s a lost art in gyms…it’s even challenging to upgrade to a talking…

“Excuse me, could I step in there and grab that dumbell” now involves weaving and waving to the point I’m almost in front of someone’s eyes before they realize I’m there. Gatecrashing their own silent disco to just ask a question no longer lands very well. How old fashioned, our ancient instinct to cling on to courtesy…!

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And back out in the ocean…

…we don’t wear the white personal isolation buds to enjoy our own little world, but for some surfers, the top shelf of ocean cool status is their steely stare into nothing. Sometimes focus on the tempo of swell lines, but often just “too cool for school”, or a laziness in our humanity, to make that relaxed human gesture of eye contact as another surfer paddles by.

A gesture that might just save your life on the bigger days or the quiet foggy days (when the head can start to imagine a large grey fin rising through the surface, while sitting their waiting between sets). 

Gentle eye contact is a gesture that, when you’re paddling out, is a slither of a bond created. 

It’s a slither of a bond that might mean that a few minutes later you might be “given” a wave (when a surfer let’s another surfer take priority on the wave) or forgiven a badly-positioned duck dive near a busy wave.

It’s the slither of a bond that might make all the difference if the ocean goes wrong on you, with some lightning strike of bad luck, a shark, or a board to the head.

Those people around you, then - with whom you made eye contact or didn’t - those people have the split second instinctual decision to be the first to paddle into the fracas to help you, possibly endangering their own lives in doing so. 

So, this small thing could be a massive thing, the eye contact that saves your life.

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This challenge to our humanity is not just dissolving us in the ocean, and in our gyms, and on our streets, it’s now believed to be starting the second we are born. 

Recent research¹ has commented on the possibility that the screen invasion in the moments after birth, both nurses and mother, distracts the trust-building mother-baby eye connection and may be diminishing the development of early bonds and security. I’ll spare us a few sad-toned paragraphs about the teenagers…but please, please watch for and try to gently encourage eye contact in our young people... 

Because our eyes are the biggest expression of our being - our window to the soul, as they say - the simplest way to connect, and to feel connected, and the easiest way to create something beautiful from nothing. All from a half-second glance.

Let’s get back to sowing the seeds of eye contact…!

With old-fashioned bonus material of a light smile, an American “hey” or “howdy” as we pass.

Enjoy the tiny seed of kinship created, the hint of care and interest in the people passing by, and enjoy the possibility of knowing somebody new.

The eyes have it, and let’s enjoy that in as many moments in community as we can. With all the possibility and connection and a spark of something that can come from eye contact…

The eyes have it, Daisy Brownlie and friends (with permission from Mum…)

1. "Technological advancements in neonatal care, such as electronic health records and monitoring devices, can sometimes disrupt the bonding period immediately after birth. Nurses might be more focused on entering data or monitoring devices, which can inadvertently reduce the time spent on direct interactions with the newborn and the mother. This reduction in interaction can affect the early bonding process, which is vital for the emotional and psychological development of the infant."

Source: BMC Psychology (2023) The role of midwives in supporting the development of the mother-infant relationship: a scoping review Accessed here