Yesterday I got on a bus in London. The driver gave my daughter and I a big, friendly smile, and then we went up to the top deck to sit at the front so she could get a good view. Then it registered with me. The bus driver had smiled at me. He wasn’t wearing a mask. Tears came to my eyes, at this simple moment. Just an ordinary day getting on a bus, and being smiled at. Even thinking about it now makes me cry.
Human faces. People said, ‘’it’s just a mask’’ and the pro/anti divide was weaponised to spread hate and disagreement. And yet, it’s so much more than just a mask. It’s so much more than a weaponised argument, when we should be thinking of bigger things.
It is a bigger thing. A human face. Just before the COVID situation had begun I had been learning about the work of Stephen Porges PHD, one of the world leading experts on the nervous system. In a short video he explains how the nervous system regulates itself by seeing human faces. It is by looking at one another’s faces and our facial expressions, that help us ‘read the room,’ to check that everything’s okay, and that we are safe.
It seems to me that if you do not see human faces your nervous system is highly likely to be in a constant fight or flight, without the ability to co-regulate with other human beings.
This is bad enough for adults, but for children, potentially devastating for children’s development. A US study found that babies born in 2020 have a lower than average IQ (just a quick interjection – I know there are many exceptions to this, some very happy babies were born in 2020!), and some speech therapists are reporting being inundated with work.
When we landed at Gatwick two days, we ended up in a long queue of families at passport control. I was fascinated at this British mask dynamic where some people where them and others don’t, and how it has become personal choice. How wonderfully freeing it felt that I could just make a choice about my own body, based on my own belief system and understanding of the science, and others around me could do the same.
I couldn’t help noticing a masked-up mother trying to entertain her children in the queue with a game of Simon Says. I couldn’t help noticing the tantrumming toddler who was desperate to run off and explore. I couldn’t help noticing the little baby in a sling whose parent’s were both masked up. I couldn’t help feeling for these children, who didn’t have an adult face to regulate with.
You might think, it’s just a plane flight, it’s just a short queue, it’s just a supermarket trip, and when these children get home they can see the faces of their loved ones again. But all these little moments, add up. What are we doing to children, to everyone?
Even for me, as an adult, I feel that I am here, shaking off, the trauma of the last two years, and relaxing into a country that I can actually navigate with ease, rather than one like a puzzle where I am constantly looking for a way around the restrictions. Even I can’t stop crying because someone on a bus smiled at me. It felt like something from long ago, from my childhood, when I grew up in England. It felt like something normal, like the way we smile at babies in the supermarket as they stare at faces, and all these little interactions, are how they learn about the world.
Not everyone does get to go home and see a human face. I remember watching a video at the height of the lockdown of an Irish woman who’d gone to the supermarket unmasked with her daughter. An elderly man had greeted them and told them how grateful he was to see them smiling. He said he used to go to the supermarket every day, just to see the smiles, but now since COVID there were no smiles.
A smile is not a little thing. It’s our way of connection. It’s how we regulate our nervous system. It’s how we build our children’s intelligence. It’s part of how we live and love and stay human.
If nothing else has come from the last two years I will never ever take seeing a smile for granted again.