I Haven’t Heard from You

The Split Second-In Consideration of Others in These Trying Times

I am still working on the publicity of my book, The Split Second:  In Consideration of Others or Look Up from the Phone and How to Deal with Rudeness in Others.  Yes, still working.   If I were a celebrity, it would be so much easier to have my book published. The world does not know me yet.  I hope soon.

Yet again, I want to touch upon the subject of consideration of others yet again which is the main subject of my work. I want to make this particular subject “short and sweet” as they say.  I have fun with the line that people often share with me, “I haven’t heard from you in a while.”  My automatic response is something like, “I haven’t heard from you either” and I try to do that with the wryest form of humor or I might say, “You know, the telephone works both ways. Did you know that?”  It is best to keep this in the humorous vain but I have to wonder sometimes, why do people feel that I have to be the first one to contact them all the time?  A friendship/relationship should be a very mutual thing so why would one person have to be the one to take the first initiative constantly My late mother who lived on the other side of the country would throw out  the “I haven’t heard from you” line quite often.  I would reply with the “telephone” response and she would usually state, “But I don’t know when you are home.”  I would say something like, “Mother, dear, I don’t know when you are home either. That is why we have this relatively new invention called ‘answering machines.” 

The Split Second would have us consider if we haven’t heard from a given friend or we have not gotten in touch with him/her, maybe we just ought to contact them and go from there.  Give it that Split Second and think that it would be rude and even a bit pompous to think that others should always be the ones to reach out to us.  Friendships or relationship strive best when they are more along the line of a “two-way street.”