By Savannah Cooper
There is a lot to observe in an ordinary day at work: The familiar faces, the passing conversations, the people who become part of your routine without you ever really thinking about it. I noticed a lot of things in those days, but perhaps not the things that mattered most. I noticed when someone was late, when a shift was busy, or when the day seemed to drag on longer than it should have. There was one coworker, however, who noticed something about me that I had not expected anyone to notice at all.
“You seem a lot happier recently.”
Nobody could have told me that those would be the last words he would ever say to me.
It has taken me until now to understand the significance of such an ordinary sentence. He had noticed a change in me—something small enough to go unspoken by everyone else. Somewhere between the shifts, the conversations, and the ordinary business of our lives, he had been paying attention. He had seen me, perhaps more clearly than I had realised. And I wonder how often he had noticed things about the people around him that the rest of us had failed to see.
I noticed him, of course. I knew his face, his voice, and the familiar presence of him at work. But I did not notice him the way he had noticed me. I did not stop to consider the person beyond the coworker I saw during my shifts, the life he lived beyond the hours we shared, or the things he might have carried that none of us knew about. I assumed there would be more time—more conversations, more ordinary days, more opportunities to know him because familiar things rarely feel temporary. And there is something devastating about realising that the people we see every day can suddenly become the people we wish we had paid more attention to.
When he passed away at the beginning of this year, I noticed the absence of someone I had never imagined would be absent. The workplace continued, the shifts carried on, and the world moved forward with a familiarity that felt almost cruel. I noticed how quickly ordinary life resumes after something extraordinary happens—how the people around us can be gone while everything they once occupied remains. And at that point, I realised how little I had truly considered the lives of the people I saw each day. I had mistaken familiarity for understanding, presence for knowing, and the ordinary for something that would always be there.
I did not notice him the way he noticed me—something I have thought about ever since. Because he saw something in me that I had not expected him to see, while I had never stopped to wonder how much of him remained unseen. I cannot know what he was experiencing privately, and I will never pretend that noticing more would have changed what happened. Still, I cannot ignore how easily we move through life assuming that the people around us are okay simply because we have no reason to believe otherwise. The art of observation is an art so lost in today’s society of constant stimulation that we have forgotten how to look beyond what is immediately in front of us. We see our coworkers every day, learn their names, share conversations, and become accustomed to their presence. But how much do we really know about them? How often do we notice the person beyond the role they play in our lives? Sometimes, we see people every day without ever truly seeing them.
It has taken me 18 years of my life to realise that the art of observation is such an important thing, yet it has been taken away from us simply because we are too caught up in our own lives to notice the lives of others. He noticed that I was happier recently. I wish I had understood then how much those words would come to mean to me, and I wish I had known that an ordinary conversation would become something I would carry long after he was gone.
To observe is to truly be at peace with ourselves and the world.
