Over the summer, when I was still in London, I had an interesting bus ride with a lady that had had a relapse with alcohol. She latched on to me from the driveway of our block of flats and we spent a good half an hour together talking (and taking several buses). The main feature of her narrative was her children and how amazing they are and how much she missed all three of them.
Well, she repeated herself a lot and I nodded a lot.
At one point the bus stopped and the driver wouldn’t continue the journey until she got off. Later, I couldn’t help but recall that people were more concerned with getting to work than commiserate with her pain and sympathising that she was going through a difficult time.
It got me wondering what the shift was in our attitude – whether we stopped caring that people were hurting and started assuming that they got what they deserved or if we have never really ever grasped the concept of compassion.
That string of thought led me to remember an article I read about what to do when your partner was too busy for your relationship. The article explained a few potential reasons that cause distance to be created between couples during the “busy seasons” and then went on to highlight the different little ideas that the neglected individual could do to get the busy individual to either involve the neglected one in their world or realign the two different worlds back together — it makes sense in my head.
It is a sharp reality that we do live in an era where we’re stuck in our head, in our little bubble, and we forget we co-exist with other people. This isn’t just a general romantic relationship issue either. We’re too busy for God, our kids, our work, our friends, our parents, our hobbies, our community, our passions, our growth, our health and ultimately we’re too busy for ourselves.
We’re going through the motions and doing everything all the time but also managing very much to do very little. There’s no balance and certainly no healthy dose of actually living life.
We want to do everything and end up doing nothing but exhaust ourselves.
I haven’t seen my mother since September. It’s almost Christmas!! Why? I’m always busy. Okay, so I work Monday to Friday, and still haven’t managed to crack the art of getting home before 10 pm – I have no recollection of what I did in October – and the month of November was spent moving house every weekend.
I had to move out of the house I had been staying at into a new place, that didn’t work out so I had to move again…. the following weekend. Then the following weekend I had to move some stuff from storage (only some stuff because I don’t have the capacity for everything). Then the remaining stuff had to be moved out of storage on the last weekend because it needs to go anywhere else but my bank account right now!
I have had one conversation with my mum over the phone and she exclaimed dramatically that I physically sounded shattered. I can always rely on my mother to make me feel better!
Another problem we seem to be having in this day and age is that we’re so focused on “connecting” and “staying in touch with everyone” that we lost the meaning of what it is to connect, interact and stay in touch with our dear ones, with Social Media and its instant gratification.
We’re so consumed with our attempt to outdo the next adventure in our Social Media life, for our social media “friends” that we’re left with unauthentic lives. We working hard to put forward our “best self” out there and yet we don’t even know who we are outside of filters and hashtags and so, we end up creating this character that we believe everyone else wants to see and wants to get to know —— taking away from others the privilege of getting to know the real us, our hearts, our lives and also disallowing others the opportunity to be themselves in turn.
You.
You are more than enough.
You are important.
And the collective “You” matters. Don’t forget to love on people.
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