What Is It We’re All Looking For?

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

A man winked at me on Monday. I was heading towards the baguettes. I was looking for Parma ham and Emmental cheese as I’m particularly fastidious about E. coli. I’m not sure where he was heading. Perhaps back to his wife and his luggage. This wink happened in an airport, and it wasn’t a creepy wink, it was a friendly one, and I was quite taken aback by it. Do men wink these days, I wondered, because it is after all, usually a man thing. You don’t see many winking women.

Then he smiled and nodded and said “Alright” and I said “Hi”. And this seemed like a lot of interaction, and I wondered did I know him? Was he Rosemary’s husband? “What sort of age was he?” said my husband when I mentioned the wink. He had picked a chicken baguette because he is more comfortable with risk-taking, and he’s also very unlikely to do any winking, and I knew he was asking because he was sure this man was on the other side of young. It was hard to tell. He was quite sunburnt. “Forties, maybe,” I said.

As we wheeled our suitcases towards a seat, we bumped into Nigel and Hazel and they’d been in the same situation as us on Sunday, stranded in Palma for an extra night when the airline who had taken a few hours to make up their mind, eventually texted to say the flight was now cancelled. They’d apologised for the inconvenience, but we’d now be returning home the following afternoon. Hazel reckoned she must have a certain look about her because as she’d been studying the board, a woman had said to her, “it’s Gate 17, love”.

I looked around and there were people scattered everywhere. They were in twos and threes and with their families and their duty-free but there were no flights going anywhere from this departure area apart from Belfast, Gate 17, and I wondered was that why the man winked at me because he felt he knew me. We had a connection. We were momentarily in this together. We had something in common. We were heading to the same place.

As we boarded, I waved at Rosemary and her husband who didn’t look at all like the winking man, and I remembered that when I’d been pressing all the buttons on the coffee machine in the Sala VIP Llevant Lounge, because investigating the quality of airport lounges is one of my new research activities, and I was trying to find any button that gave me more than a trickle of hot water, she had sidled up beside me and asked me was I going to Belfast. I hadn’t opened my mouth, and I wasn’t sure how she knew. Maybe I had the look too. And it was Rosemary who slightly hysterically broke the cancellation news because she got the message before we did and she asked what we were going to do about somewhere to sleep and how we were going to get there, and she was panicking because her children had school and while she was launching herself into managing logistics, her husband was launching himself across the room towards a bottle of white and was pouring himself another large glass. She was looking for guidance and reassurance and someone to see her and so we swapped numbers and promised we’d keep in touch, and I said I wouldn’t be waiting for a bus that would take ages to arrange. I’d be going back to the accommodation I’d just left, in a taxi, and then I’d be having more tapas and a negroni and when I arrived at the seafront hotel close to the cathedral, my favourite receptionist came out to greet me. “I thought that was you Mrs Sloan,” he said. “It’s good to see you”.

I’ve been doing an online course on Thursday mornings and it lasts ten weeks which is a big commitment for me because I don’t commit, and I don’t like to sign up to anything that’s on at the same time every week, and I don’t like Zoom. The course has theology and philosophy and history and archaeology and morality thrown into it as well as a lot of Australians who are getting up at dawn to dominate the discussions. In the most recent session, we were discussing whether faith makes sense of life. What is it we’re all looking for? And it turns out we have this age-old longing for meaning. There are three questions that must be answered before our quest can be satisfied - Who am I? Do I matter? Can I make a difference? We yearn for identity, value and agency, to be something, to contribute to something, to change something. And I reckoned that yes, this makes sense and even though God might still love you or especially saves you if you’re Donald Trump, not knowing who you are and whether you matter can make you quite messed up, but I thought it has to be simpler than this, what we’re all looking for. There are days when I don’t care if I make a difference, especially if I have to earn it or evidence it.

And I thought about that scene in Rivals which I’ve watched numerous times now because it speaks to me and it gets right to the core of our deepest yearnings and I’ve even taken my phone out and held it close to the television and recorded the most crucial fifteen seconds. It’s the 1980s and Lizzie is dancing and earlier, her husband James who can’t stand the sight of her, tells her she has a ladder in her tights and she’s humiliated and her face falls, and then Freddie whose wife has just told him to sit down because he’s embarrassing himself, ends up beside Lizzie and they turn and they grin at each other and they start to dance and their moves synchronise beautifully, their heads, their shoulders, their feet, and they jump up and down and they delight in each other’s presence and it doesn’t matter that she has a ladder in her tights and she’s not perfect and in that moment, he saves her and she, him. And that’s the start of it. Whilst James ignores Lizzie, Freddie sees her. He notices her typewriter is staining her hands and so he buys her a word processor. He chases after a train to retrieve the chapters of her novel which she accidentally leaves behind. They bond over their shared love of cake, eating it secretly together in defiance of the partners who fat-shame them. They giggle. They listen. They respect. They see and they are seen.

And I think that’s what we’re all looking for. We want to be seen. We want someone, anyone, to acknowledge we exist and for our existence alone to be sufficient, nothing more required of us. “In the ancient part of our brains, not being seen is equivalent to being sentenced to death,” I read. And when I look into the science of winking, I discover that whilst a wink is one of the weirdest things a person can do, it is also an incredibly intimate form of shared communication. It involves eye contact. It is fleeting. It is often involuntary. It says, “I see you. And I hope you see me back”.

Somewhere along the line, I think we might have got confused about what we are longing for in this world. In all the fuss about identity, value and agency and searching for who I am and whether I matter and what difference I make, I think we’ve confused being seen with getting noticed. One involves striving. The other doesn’t involve any striving at all. This is why I am so moved by Lizzie and Freddie, that unconditional being seen. And perhaps this is why faith makes sense of life. It tells us we’re all seen and we’re all worth saving, all of us, not just Donald Trump.

“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous,” said Elizabeth Gilbert.