Masks.

Before March of 2020, most of us had never given them a second thought.

Almost no one wore them — what was there to think about?

Over the last year and a half, however, they’ve become omnipresent and unavoidable. In California, as everyone’s painfully aware, they’ve been mandated in virtually all public settings for the last 15 months, and across the country they’ve ironically become simultaneous symbols of tyranny (as half the country sees it) and compassion (as seen by the other half).

Beyond even that symbolism, however, the difference between masked and unmasked has become one of the reigning metaphors of our time.

Grocery workers, nurses, custodians and other formerly inconspicuous workers suddenly went from invisible to “essential” — really, to indispensable.

The plight of the working poor, likewise often transparent to so much of society, has suddenly been unmasked.

And, most painful of all, the sting of racial injustice, which so many of us wanted to imagine we had left behind with the election of Barack Obama, has again seared itself into our collective consciousness.

It has been an era of unmasking.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced that the state mask mandate will end Tuesday — so long as you’ve been vaccinated (and, for heaven’s sake, everyone, please get vaccinated) you can begin to leave your mask at home.

When that moment arrives, and for the first time in 15 months, we will be able to see the full faces of those we work with, play with and love — but don’t live with. We’ll suddenly have the chance to remember the way a dimple puckers a co-worker’s cheek or the way a smile overtakes the face of friend when he laughs. We’ll see how eyes dance together with a friend’s mouth in joyful moments even as we remember, too, how tears trickle past a tight-lipped frown at the moment of weeping.

All of this will be very much for the good because we’ve learned that while eyes may be a window to the soul, without a full face even the eyes can seem stranded and un-whole.

As these full faces reappear all around us, however, wouldn’t it be a miracle if we could allow their reappearance to remind us of the individuality and shared humanity of every person we meet?

How many of the problems we now better understand would be ameliorated if this moment of unmasking became, too, a moment of remembering how alike are our souls beneath the differences that define our diversity?

And even more to that point: How would it transform society if we allowed the last 15 months of shared suffering to move us beyond pity, apathy and enmity to empathy?

Dr. Tyler Johnson is Inpatient Oncology Service Director at Stanford Hospital.