Relationships In The World

As we think too much about society and change, which is very much necessary at this point of time in the world but, it is also true that same change has to come from you and your family. We always forget this. The below remarks were eloquent and heartfelt and they captured perfectly one of the things we risk losing as a society that communicates primarily in snippets of misspelled words and emoticons.

“The one thing people can hopefully try to take away, I guess, is the relationships they have with people,” when something happened in our life with our beloved family members, I was sitting and, in my head, thinking what I could have done differently. When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth?

“We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”

These are words that we should all study, and heed. I’ll be printing them out, keeping a copy on my desk, and reminding my family member thoughts whenever I can.

But the lesson is that we should all be more attentive to the people whose lives are intertwined with ours, through our families or our friends or our places of work. We enter and exit this world alone, but we are in between those moments part of a broad and complex fabric that both provides us with support and commands it from us.

Let’s remember that the next time — and every time — we’re more worried about interacting with someone who isn’t in the room than someone who is.


--Inspired from Brad Quinn's Facebook Statement.