it will be our faces you will see, not our backs
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine 🇺🇦
Whoever we are, wherever we are, wherever we came from, wherever we hope to go – and especially today if we’re fearful, or feeling helpless – make eye contact.
It doesn’t matter with whom. All that’s needed is that they’re willing to gaze too. Let us learn to set words aside for a space, as often as may be, and simply to hold one another’s gaze. What we identify through the ‘windows of the soul’ is beyond words.
We turn from the windows to open doors and borders – and oddly, what we thought we saw in another we recognise, maybe for the first time in a long time, in ourselves.