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Growing up in New York City, I often caught glimpses of other people's lives through the rows of windows that faced the windows of my family's apartment. From our kitchen window, I could look down a broad air shaft, to the rear courtyard of my building. Across the way and to the left, dainty curtains hung above the small table where an old lady sometimes sat, alone, sipping tea. Above her and to the right, a child peered through safety bars, clutching the ears of a stuffed bunny. The large living room window of our apartment looked out over the New York cityscape, my elementary school in the foreground, the landscape spreading out past the Empire State building and, beyond, to the former World Trade Towers. On sick days, I would look down wistfully through my bedroom window into the windows of my school and watch insect-sized children, their little forms moving around the part of the classroom that was within my line of sight. How strange to see into a world—my world!—from the outside looking in, as things buzzed along without me, visible proof that I was not the center of the world I inhabited.
These glimpses allowed me to tell myself stories about the other denizens of the city, reassuring me that I was not alone. New York fairly teemed with signs of the private lives of others, details that were invisible when I walked along the sidewalks, outdoors, amid the maze of tall buildings.
The world we inhabit today, a Zoom world where our patients' images pop open onto our screen like jack-in-the boxes, brings to mind these moments from my childhood—what I saw of other people's dwellings through their tiny windows— where peeks of other people's lives connected me to the rest of humanity and offered an escape from the confined spaces of my own four walls.