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More often than not, I am the one who reaches out to stay in touch - with acquaintances, friends and even family. The regularity depends on the nature of the relationship. It’s not a scheduled thing I follow; more like a feel. Current circumstances certainly play a role. The quandary of course is that you only become aware of what’s going on in someone’s life with fairly regular interaction, if the nature of the relationship is such that these kinds of things are shared. And that only happens when there is a level of trust, which is built upon regular interaction. And, so it goes. It's another one of those things in life for which you can’t keep score – the number of times you initiate a call vs. them. You’ll drive yourself crazy. You quickly come to the realization that you’ll continue doing it because that’s who you are and not just something you do. You learn not to judge the reasons why others just don’t reach out to you. Like so many people at this stage of life, it feels that newly developed relationships can’t replace those lost from the past, at least not to the same depth. When my mind drifts, it often goes to people, events and times in my life that were fundamental. I wonder just what it is that drives me to reach out, to reach back to these people. Is it a blessing or a curse, something admired or dreaded? Do these occasional trips down memory lane and the updates that inevitably flow cause these folks to care more, or to better remember me? At the least, they demonstrate that I still care – that they are still important to me. It hurts when I come to realize that, at times, some of those long-ago relationships meant more to me than they did to them. “If I remember this or them so clearly, why don’t they?” Did I not make a favorable impression on them to the same extent they did on me? Do they even think about it? Or is it that people just don’t take the time to reach back, reach out, so caught up are they in the here and now? Maybe my life is just not as busy as theirs are now. Or, maybe it’s that age old philosophical debate about whether you believe the past just slips out of reach, or persists into the future. And when they just fall away, it also hurts. I recently took a walk in the woods, one of the places where my mind wanders in all directions over quite a span of years, and I think of all those people. I sat down on a bench afterwards, took out my phone and perused its contact list. I came across a group of names and I focused on the fact that not one of them ever calls me; actually, they never really did. So, since I stopped calling, we’ve fallen out of touch. I deleted that group from my contact list. It felt good at the time, like a closure, or an acceptance that it’s over. But it didn’t feel “right.” And it still doesn’t. I’m still left aching and wondering what to do with my heart. On the trip I’m currently on, I reached out to a few folks to get together for a meal or a coffee while I was in town. I never heard back. Though certainly discouraged, I remained undeterred, or at least true to myself. In the middle of that trip and looking forward, I reached out to someone whom I hadn’t seen in quite a few years to get together during my next trip. The response was immediate, very enthusiastic and welcoming. That lifted my heart. |