As I’m approaching Lake Superior Hall, a girl walks out across that winding sidewalk with strawberry blonde curls dripping down her face, staring at her phone. Not an abnormal occurrence in the slightest. Class ends and our eyes glance down to reconnect with whatever we feel we missed in that hour and 15 minutes as we make our way to the bus stop. Typical. Yet as I watched her path slowly intersect with mine, I wondered what she was experiencing.

It’s a lovely day. The leaves are gently swaying, the sun is radiating across campus. I can faintly smell the water from Zumberge pond. Thoughts of students could consist of class and home. But that isn’t quite right. Simply looking at someone is not enough to gain any sense of who they are. We’re not these static beings living life only in the present moment.

Others’ perspective, their experiences, deviate so much from these sensory details. We are not just here. We are also in the past and the future. What we see is not an indicator of what we feel. I think this is both somewhat obvious and also very fascinating. It’s just amazing to me how we all appear to be experiencing the same thing sometimes. We all are just making our way home. But some people are actually going through something much bigger that we can’t see.

Someone may be in a fight with their significant other. A fight against depression. They might be grieving. They might be in the U.S. for the first time. They might be juggling two, maybe three jobs, to pay for school. They might have just been presented a wonderful career opportunity that requires them to leave studies early.

This is true prior to technological developments, of course. Though, the invention of phones really assisted in masking these battles as well as isolating us from one another. People can easily fake a smile while some different reality exists within their phone. The thing is, we just don’t know.

We aren’t all the same, but we do have a very vast number of similarities. As we venture around our little sunny Allendale, we can reflect on the ways in which we build a community. It’s so easy for us to see the physical differences, but I wonder what it would be like if we noticed the similarities. If we remembered that all those little colorful dots have lives that are just as unique and complex as our own.

We all have moments of love, grief, conflict, excitement, nerves: we’re all human. We can unite in the fact that we are so diversely similar, no matter how involved in our phone screens we may externally be.