I have always found it hard to balance your current life with the past – I guess you become too involved and absorbed with the way you manage your days and moving forward, that you tend to forget how you were also very involved in your past life back then. Without you realizing it, friends and families are forgotten, and the distance grows wider and wider.
For obvious reason I’m not exactly proud of this trait I have, which often get interpreted as ignorance or worse yet, being selfish. Not once or twice, but many times people whom I used to share my life with wholeheartedly pointed this out to me. If I have been any smarter I won’t make the same mistake twice but breaking an old habit is not exactly easier than finding a needle in the hay.
What does it take to let people from your past know that you have not forgotten about them anyway? A regular facebook message? Postcards from the cities you have visited? Long emails detailing what’s happening in your life? Random gifts on the mail? Does a quick ‘Happy Birthday’ wall message on facebook actually count?
My take on this issue has been, for far too long, that it is okay to send updates sparely but it needs to be long and detailed to make it count. Somehow I think that a short ‘How are you?’ email is not enough to show people that I care, which has caused many griefs from other ends as it translates to me keep delaying any updates. I like to think that it doesn’t mean that I don’t care, but now I begin to see the logic behind their thinking, that if I can’t even be bothered with writing a paragraph or two, then do I really care about them?
A blog post from Shirley which I stumbled upon today has touched me in ways that she probably didn’t even intend to. She was recalling a brief chat we had a few months back on her plan to reconnect with her famiy because career is only a part of her whole life, albeit an important one. Even the fact that she remembered this little, maybe insignificant chat we had shows me that she genuinely cares about people she used to know in her old life.
It definitely gets me thinking of who my true friends really are and if they struggle with the same problem with me, how are they coping with it, maintaining communication with the people they care about. Every time I get a random message from Nancy, for example, it always put a smile on my face because I know she really wants to know what is happening in my life. I may always be cycnical about short messages, and will only send them sparely, but I certainly come to appreciate that there are many ways to communicate and you can always tell the difference between those who really care and those wo don’t.
And that probably means that a short paragraph replying my mom’s email tomorrow would be much more appropriate than waiting for two more weeks just to make the email content longer.
