Nephatali: Seeing the Invisible

Last semester, I participated in the photo booth project along with 380 people associated with Scripps. From the moment I heard about it, I was excited about the project. When Lisa Kau and I had our pictures taken in the white plastic booth, I laughed at the way the camera lens moved and rotated. I looked forward to seeing other people’s portraits. I expected to see other Scripps students posing and smiling like Lisa and me, but the pictures sur­prised me.

When the wall was put up, I spent two separate half hours in the first day walking around the photo wall, admiring the pictures of people with poses and expressions and objects I would never have thought of and faces I had never noticed before. Even now I can clearly remember the pictures I spent time viewing: pictures of my friends Sarah and Julia right after working out, Professor Ou with his wife and daughter, Dean Wood with her many electronic accessories, and countless other people I knew, had seen before, or had never observed. I was only one of many people who stopped to view the wall that day.

However, the wall was taken down some time ago, and I have no idea when this happened. After my initial fascination with the photo wall, I no longer paused to look at the faces on it. During the first week it was put up, I had stopped once or twice and had been surprised that I kept see­ing new faces. Yet after that first week, every time I passed it, I would be heading to a meal or a class or a rehearsal, and I didn’t have time to stop. I didn’t notice when it was gone.

When it was first introduced, the photo booth project was heralded as a force to unite and represent the Scripps community. However, the photo wall taught me more in its absence; although I noticed it initially, I had made it invisible long before it physically disappeared. My mind was constantly focused on only what it needed to know and who it needed to see, and did not have extra energy to look at people who were not immediately important to its purposes.

Who am I missing now? Who do I walk by count­less times and never once stop to say hello? Just as the photo wall faded into scenery, the people that surround me every day have become little more than scenery when I do not take the time to notice them and talk with them.

I remember one walk to my class at Pomona that was different from all of the others. I was taking a dif­ferent route than I normally did and, also unlike my usual schedule, I had fifteen minutes to spare. As I passed by the small plot of greenery outside the southwest corner of Frary, I saw a man working there. We smiled at each other, and I almost kept walking, but then I stopped. He came over and we talked. It turned out that his father had passed away the previous weekend, and he was going to the funeral this weekend. He takes his mother out to coffee every weekend. He loves his two kids and hopes they’ll do the same for him when he is older. He hopes to retire in five years and is a sec­ond-degree black belt. His name is Nephtali. Talking with him was the most inspiring experience—he was so peaceful, so joyous, and so loving. I almost didn’t meet him. I’ve walked past that plot many times since then but have not seen him again.

We’ll never know who we have walked by and how many one-in-a-lifetime conversations we have missed if we are not looking. As a community, we must notice each other every day, and expand our world view beyond only those objects, obligations, and people who are closest to us. We must see those who we have made invisible.