The human touch

Casual contact with real humans takes work

Before we begin…

Think about the past week. How many people did you talk to face-to-face? How many were outside your family? What did you talk about? How did your encounter(s) make you feel? How do you feel about human contact these days? 

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Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

Craving a little face-to-face time

Last Saturday, two days before the flooding that made national news, I loaded the dogs into the car and headed to the dog park. I believed the hourly weather forecast that said the rain would not start until later in the afternoon and I didn’t want to miss my time with five women who meet there every week. It’s become sort of like our church if the church were called Our Mother of Perpetual Barking or The Covenant of Four-Leggeds and their Friends or “The Coven” for short. 

You know what happened. The rain was early and although we huddled for a half-hour under the branches of a tree whose name I do not know, we soon got soaked. The dogs stood, wide-eyed and wet, wondering why we were all still there. 

I’ll tell you why. It is one of the few times all week that I get in the car, leave the house, and go talk to people who are not my partner who is often the only other person I speak with face-to-face on a regular basis. The rest of my family and friends are voices over a phone line or faces on a Zoom screen where I sit, pinned in place, trying not to think about how long it has been since those loved ones and I have touched. Even when we cover a fair amount of ground, I hang up aware of all the things we don’t talk about, things that might more easily surface over a cup of coffee or a walk together. 

Yet, when given the opportunity to get out more, I don’t. Finishing my novel depends on my ability to sit in a chair just down the hall from where I sleep. Most of my important relationships outside the one I have with my husband, are long-distance and have been for years so I am grateful for the technology that allows me stay connected with them even if it leaves me aching and feeling empty on occasion. Shopping used to make me break out in a metaphorical rash and I welcome the ease of doing it as much as I can online. Appointments with doctors, dentists, vets, etc. can happen without ever speaking to another person. When I need technical assistance I can go on YouTube and find a friendly stranger to walk me through a solution to my problem as many times as I need without complaint or irritation. I notice that even among my own contemporaries there has been a shift from phone calls to texting. It is possible to get through a day and feel exhausted by all the interaction I’ve had without ever coming within touching distance of another person. 

There is a cost to this and, lately, I’ve been more aware of it. A steady throb that goes sharp, like a splinter that has worked its way beneath my skin. The throbbing grew more intense after I read the essay, “Too Much of Everything Except Each Other” by Janice Badger Nelson. The essay opens with a devastating scene that is probably replicated daily in coffee shops and checkout lines everywhere. A customer speaks intently of feeling adrift to a friend who is behind her. In front of her a barista waits and waits, trying to take her order. In the end the customer takes the coffee and never once looks at the cashier. Nelson, who’d witnessed the whole thing, was next in line. 

“It was my turn. I asked the barista how her day was going. She looked at me warily and said, “Some days it feels like I just don’t exist.” - Janice Badger Nelson, “Too Much of Everything Except Each Other”

In a few piercing paragraphs, Nelson acknowledges the forces that work against engagement IRL with real human beings - technology, cultural shifts – and references the many studies that show loneliness and disconnection are on the rise but then she hit me where it hurt: 

“...everyone already knows these things anyway. They just don’t do it.

It’s not that we don’t know how. Maybe we are just out of practice. Or maybe we are simply adrift in our own cloud of too much of everything all of the time.” -

Janice Badger Nelson RN

This feels true. It is also true that norms are shifting. Each generation uses technology differently yet all people, young and old, use it to create a force-field when out in public. We get used to not seeing each other even when we are not hiding behind a phone or a screen. Case in point: the woman in the essay who spoke of her isolation yet never once connected with the barista who was trying to help her. 

When I try to meet the gaze of passersby on the cliffs while I’m out walking the dogs, it almost feels rude. Some people avert their eyes. Some are looking past me into whatever space they concoct for themselves as they listen to whatever is pouring through their earbuds.

Two decades ago, when I was newly arrived in this city, I couldn’t walk that route without a few dozen “hi’s” or an impromptu conversation with a stranger or a neighbor. I started at least three days a week with a visit to a coffee shop two blocks away where we all came to know each other’s faces and dogs, even if we didn’t know each other’s names. I sought and got a freelance job on a local weekly that gave me a reason to talk to lots of people about lots of things. Those little conversations and familiar faces anchored me; they helped make this new place my home. They fed me while I went about the harder work of working, writing, making friends, getting involved in projects, or managing long-distance relationships.

I have none of that now. If I want the kind of casual human contact that connects me with others, I have to go out and work for it. And, as

Janice Badger Nelson RN

pointed out, I don’t, or not as often as I should. 

The pandemic hardened my tendencies for keeping the world at arm’s length, but I cannot blame my behavior on Covid. It’s just easier. 

As I read Janice’s essay, I remembered that a year and a half ago, I knew none of those women I meet every Saturday at the dog park. I met one of them, all alone at the end of a sunny day with her dog, not long after I first adopted Frida. A simple “Hi, cute dog!” turned into a conversation which, when we saw each other another day, continued. Then she casually mentioned that a group of women with small dogs had begun to gather on Saturday mornings. I should stop by some time. I did. They are smart, funny, great readers and thinkers. And they don’t mind when either of my dogs leaps into their laps. 

So, a little after reading Janice’s essay last week, I left the house after lunch all by myself. I got in the car and headed out to the library, then the bank, Target, and the grocery store. There was an aura of adventure that did not really match up with these kinds of errands. I didn’t expect to come home with new friends and I didn’t. I did, however, make eye contact and a bit of conversation. I laughed, talked about books, and asked for help. I don’t know how the cashiers, the librarian, or the bank manager felt but it seemed to go well. It seemed that, for a few moments, we all felt seen. 

More on this: selected short reads

What happened to me? When did I stop seeing human interaction for the opportunity that it is? Am I the same person who wrote just two years ago about being hungry for small talk that, if we allow it, can turn into something more? 

The goddess and elevator talk.

Robyn Ryle

of You Think Too Much, who writes often and well about the ways we find or fail to find community,  recently wrote two pieces that illuminated the way small interactions can make a huge difference. 

Lunch with the Goddess

“It’s hard to describe the hang. You know it when you’re in it. Time stops in the hang. Your to-do list disappears. There is no purpose to the hang. The hang is not productive, because the hang exists outside capitalism. “In the hang we are so much more than workers or units. In the hang, we are human. The hang is the hang is the hang.

Our lunch with the Goddess was the hang. Spontaneous. Unplanned. Delightful.” -

Robyn Ryle

The opposite of the elevator pitch

“When I feel despair for the world, I often remind myself of these simple truths—people still mostly talk to each other on the elevator. It’s not just awkwardness that makes them turn and smile at their fellow passengers. I want to believe it’s a natural response when you put humans in a close space together. They talk to each other. It’s who we are. It’s what we do.” -

Robyn Ryle

When screen time may hurt performance. This study suggests that the time spent watching porn can get in the way of a man’s experience when he is with a partner in real life. It’s easier, it seems, to have fun with someone he’ll never touch.

Face-to-face and mental health. And this article in Psychology Today rounds up the research being done to explore what is lost when face-to-face communication declines. One finding: face-to-face communication appears linked to better mental health. 

Fun things to share

Your Own Customized Book Tracker

Laura Sackton

of Books and Bakes loves making spreadsheets almost as much as she loves reading. She has put together a simple book tracker for those of us who want to look back on our reading someday and see our journey at a glance. You can customize it yourself or she will do it for you. All the details can be found here. 

More Badreads Subscriptions to Give Away!

I am giving away three more one-month gift subscriptions to Badreads by New York Times bestselling author,

Lauren Hough

. If you’ve ever read Hough’s collection of essays, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, a piece like this one in Texas Highways, or her Substack then you know that her voice is one of those that pulls you back over and over.

If you are interested, let me know in the comments or shoot me an email. I’ll draw three names at random on Monday, January 29. 

Lauren Hough writes with the kind of honesty, empathy, anger and, humor most writers struggle for. She’s a memoirist, a writer of essays that make you laugh, tear up, and think, one of those funny people on social media who can say just about anything because she understands the difference between funny and mean, witty and cynical. She is a writer who came to it after doing a lot of other things — bouncer, cable guy, bartender — and surviving a few things — growing up in a religious cult, being forced out of the Air Force in the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” She has lived in a lot of places including Japan, Switzerland, and Amarillo, Texas. Somewhere along the line she developed a keen eye for humanity — including her own — and the ability to tell a good story. She observes closely whether she’s looking at the world around her or herself. She’s not afraid to show her work — many of her recent posts are efforts to figure out a problem with her latest book, stuff I do but rarely share. As a writer, I find it exciting. As a reader, I love spending time with her even if it is only online or in the pages of a book.

Here’s my take on Leaving Isn't’ the Hardest Thing. Hough’s next book will be about her travels across the country with her dog, Woody, in the spirit of John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. Right now she is in a small cabin in Oklahoma trying to finish it and sending dispatches through her Substack, Badreads. 

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“I just want someone to talk to…”

How to support Spark

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Gratefully yours,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…Cascades of light from Debra L.

“One of my moments of Zen-looking east to the North Cascades as the afternoon sun hits the mountain tops.  Nature calms me. This was taken during our cold snap last week.” - subscriber Debra L.

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”: 

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

I can’t wait to see what you send!

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