MY WEEKLY BLOG<\/p>\n
Did I Call You or Did You Call Me?<\/p>\n
I was having coffee with a couple of my students a few days\u00a0ago. For many months they had been faces on Zoom, but now, they had bodies and\u00a0they were sitting opposite me. It was good to see them in person, we spoke for\u00a0a while and then one of them said, \u201cYou have a lot of good friends that you\u2019ve\u00a0known for a long time,\u201d she said. \u201cYou talk about them with so much love. How\u00a0do you keep so many people so close?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI reach out and make sure we stay connected,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo they call you as much as you call them?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t keep score. If I want to talk to someone, I pick up\u00a0the phone. I don’t think about \u00a0who made the last phone call. Some people aren’t good at reaching out. I am, so I do it, and if it\u2019s something important and they don\u2019t respond, I call again.\u201d<\/p>\n
I have a girlfriend who always drives when we go places. She
likes to drive, I don’t, so we each do what we like and it works out. We don\u2019\u00a0follow a set of rules so there are no expectations. No quid pro quo. Not tit\u00a0for tat. No \u201cI drove last time so you should drive this time.\u201d We just show up\u00a0in the way we feel comfortable and we always enjoy each other\u2019s company.<\/p>\n
A person I know cut off someone she cared about because he\u00a0didn’t call her as much as she called him. \u201cWhy do you care?\u201d I asked her. \u201cIs\u00a0he present when you talk to him? Is he there for you when you need him?\u201d She\u00a0answered yes to both questions but she still refused to talk to him. She\u00a0suffered from the separation, they had been really close, and sadly, they are\u00a0still at odds.<\/p>\n
I learned a lot about this in 1988, when someone I loved was\u00a0dying of AIDS. During his final days, he called everyone with whom he was estranged\u00a0or felt awkward, he made amends and he forgave each of them and asked them for\u00a0their forgiveness. He didn’t want to die with unfinished business. When he told\u00a0me about it and I left the hospital that day, I thought to myself, \u201cAm I going\u00a0to wait until I\u2019m dying to make peace with people? What if I started now and\u00a0never ended a conversation without closure?\u201d I do my very best with that.<\/p>\n
I knew someone for many years when he suddenly cut off\u00a0contact with me. He \u201cghosted me\u201d in the current vernacular and I had no idea\u00a0why. I sent texts and emails asking for an explanation but he remained silent.\u00a0I didn’t like it but I let it go. I figured he\u2019d come around at some point. We\u00a0had so much history, it seemed inevitable and two years later I got an email\u00a0from him. I checked in to see how I was feeling about him. I thought I’d be\u00a0angry but I wasn\u2019t. He had cut me off, it wasn\u2019t the other way around, and I\u00a0had no beef with him. I called and asked him what had happened. I really didn’t
know. It turned out he had taken offense when I didn’t thank him in the\u00a0acknowledgments of one of my books. I was surprised. He had photo shopped one picture\u00a0of a friend, that was it, and it hadn\u2019t occurred to me to thank him in the\u00a0acknowledgments. \u201cIf you told me, we could have talked about it,\u201d I said. \u201cWhy\u00a0did you wait two years?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to call you for the last year and a half but I\u00a0just couldn’t do it. Too much time had gone by and I felt foolish.\u201d He had\u00a0wasted a lot of time when we could have benefited from each other\u2019s company and\u00a0some damage was done. I still loved him but I didn’t completely trust him any\u00a0more. We stayed in touch. We spoke from time to time, and when he suddenly passed\u00a0away a few months ago, I was glad I hadn’t held a grudge.<\/p>\n
Even when they get sticky, some relationships are worth fighting\u00a0for. If you make a commitment to be honest, there are bound to be disagreements\u00a0and different ways of looking at things. But if you don’t run away, if you stay\u00a0in there, speak up and listen to each other, if you put yourself in someone\u00a0else\u2019s shoes and try to see the situation from his or her point of view, when\u00a0you come back together, you feel closer than before.\u00a0When you think about your life, is there anyone you\u2019ve lost\u00a0touch with?\u00a0 Why don’t you reach out?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MY WEEKLY BLOG Did I Call You or Did You Call Me? I was having coffee with a couple of my students a few days\u00a0ago. For many months they had been faces on Zoom, but now, they had bodies and\u00a0they were sitting opposite me. It was good to see them in person, we spoke for\u00a0a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}