Sunday, December 04, 2011

Where are your friends????

Throughout our lives we meet people, some are simply just folks we see in passing, a glance, a tip of a hat, or other less friendly gesture, and some become acquaintances who weave themselves in and out of our lives for myriads of reasons, some good, some not, but from time to time much less often than not you meet someone you can call a friend. We all have friends. We have friends from childhood, friends from high school and college, friends from work or professional relationships, and social friends.

When a person becomes your friend or you become theirs as a rule a bond forms that last a lifetime. Of course this bond might simply be an indelible memory of the person, but a bond forms nonetheless, assuming that the friendship was in fact a real friendship, one that was based on mutual respect, trust, admiration, and in many cases love. I’m not ashamed to admit that I have a deep love of my friends. There are times that I don’t particularly like certain friends, or that a friend may fall out of favor for one reason or another, but as a Christian I would like to believe I love them in some meaningful way, and hope they do the same regardless of their momentary status.

When I grew up there were no cellular telephones, no personal computers, no internet, life was pretty simple. I man a met recently that lives down in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia said, if someone wants to get in touch with me, they know where to find me. I have a phone at my house, and if I’m not home someone knows where I am. Wow, did that somehow make a whole lot of sense. That is the way it used to be before technology became our way of life and before the age of instant gratification settled in on all of us. Here and now has to be better right? It makes me wonder sometimes… but I digress. Social Networking works for a reason. It works because it takes the effort out of doing what I just described, staying in touch, or going to find someone. That’s not evil, it is however our reality, and an evil we should be at least somewhat weary of when we lay our heads down at night.

So what’s my point in babbling on about all of this with friendship stuff and old and new. It’s a sad point and one I am not very proud of frankly. I suppose there’s an app for it, but since I don’t have an iPhone along with most of the country, I’ll just come out with it… It sucks to lose someone and not find out about it until months or well several years later. Yes, that’s right people die and people don’t know that they died and it sucks when they find out. There I said it. It sucks more when they realize how bad they feel for themselves that they didn’t do what they should have done to keep in touch, to be a better friend. It’s guilt, its remorse, its sadness, and it’s grief, but it’s also fact. We all have lives that are busy and we all lose track of folks we care about. We don’t stop caring, people grow apart and go their separate ways from time to time; that’s no one’s fault, but it does happen all too often. Then there are people that move away, you might be one of them. I’m one of them. I moved and I left a forwarding address to some, to others I didn’t but I certainly wasn’t unable to be found, “someone knew where I was”.

Now that Facebook, its predecessor MySpace, and the much more thrifty Twitter are available, along with the many Classmate and Reunion websites, it’s possible for most people who want to be found to be found. In some cases it’s impossible not to be found with all the data available online. There are new entries to the market as well Google’s Google Plus with Circle’s is fast growing amongst the more tech savvy crowd, and with those who want a more private environment than Facebook in which to wonder about . I’m on all of them, but I prefer the Twitter arena personally. Google Plus remains largely unexplored however.

Anyway, back to the point, the point being that I’m sad. I’m sad that I sucked as a friend to a couple of people who in some way I could have benefited, I’ll never know. I was too involved in my own life doing unimportant things that didn’t change the world, or even my world, but seemed important at the time, too important to take time to find out what was happening in the lives of those I cared about. Perhaps I am being too hard on myself here, perhaps a little melodramatic. I’m trying to drive home a point, and that is that as Christmas approaches and you send out your “CHRISTMAS CARDS” (Okay I send out some secular cards too) that a once a year remembrance of people just isn’t enough. They might not be there in January, or March, or June. Next year when your Christmas card comes back return to sender you may not have enough money to buy postage to get it to the forwarding address, I hear that Heaven is a long way off, and well paper doesn’t keep well at the “other address”. The bottom line is we all need to do better. We all need to be better, and we should try to find ways to appreciate the friends we have. Of course Social Networking is a great way to keep in touch, but it’s not really the end all be all. If you’re close, you should do some face time.

I stopped reading newspapers some time ago because they were too depressing and well for the most part beyond the front page and the sports section I really didn’t get much out of them. Even when I did buy them I rarely ever looked at the obituaries. Sadly enough to say I did that more often when I was growing up having lost so many friends in those formative years. Perhaps now that should be the one section I should read, certainly it’s one I’ve missed at least twice in the last several years. Forgoing that I will turn to Google e-mail alerts for news, at least then at least I won’t miss an obituary. The holiday season gives us much to reflect upon, but nothing more important to ponder than our relationships with others. They are more precious than any dollars we spend at any store, more valuable than any gift we can give or receive. We only get one life, we only get a few friends, let’s all try not to forget that long past the day the decorations get put back in the boxes after New Years.



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