“I Haven’t Heard from You”

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

I thank all of you who have been so supportive as I try to get support for my unpublished book The Split Second:  In Consideration of Others or Look Up from the Phone and How to Deal with Rudeness in Others. I still have faith that I can have the experience of having it published. I still wonder if my various friends think I post too much in terms of words. I am trying to be shorter.

For the next few blog posts, I am going to take familiar sayings we might say to one another that I think most of us don’t think through totally. This one makes me laugh, but I still do not like it all anyway: “I haven’t heard from you lately.” Or someone might say, “I haven’t heard from him/her/them lately.” I wish folks would think that one through. My late mother used to call from North Carolina from time to time and utter that sentence. I would respond, “I haven’t heard from you either.” Then in a fun and not disrespectful way, I would say, “You know what’s interesting about the telephone? It works both ways.” She would usually respond, “Well, I never know when you’re home.” Then I would say, “I don’t know when you’re home either. But we now have this concept called “voicemail.” It’s nice, isn’t it?” 

I hope the reader is grasping the concept I am trying to develop here: if we want to talk with someone, we should just contact that person and not sit around and wait or expect him/her to initially call us. Yes, it is nice when an old friend contacts us; it can feel very good. However, why should we expect the other person to always make the first move with the contact? I think it would be nice if we got that “I haven’t heard from you lately” out of our vernacular.

This one was very short for me, right folks?