I am terrible at keeping in touch. I can jump up and down stairs on a pogo stick, but despite every tool at my fingertips - cell phone, e-mail, Skype and even stamps and envelopes if I feel like going retro - I often struggle to maintain constant contact with my friends located far from Philadelphia.
It's something that I hate admitting. I love my friends, I like writing and just like you, I spend way too much time on Gmail: why do I lose touch when there are so many available methods of communication, all of which are so easy?
And I know I'm not the only one; after all, communication ultimately has to be mutual. But that doesn't make it less embarrassing. All legitimate excuses - expense, effort - have diminished with the demise of snail-mail.
While I could attribute a thousand different reasons to this trend, for me it mostly boils down to self-interest - the only thing, perhaps, more difficult to swallow than admitting that it's difficult to keep in touch in the first place.
We're 20-somethings with classes to ace, extracurriculars to lead, futures to plan and resumes to pad. I know I'm not the only one to whom an hour-long, and even more long-due, phone conversation actually seems indulgent. Shouldn't that time be focused on something more. productive?
Enter irony. The event that precipitates the separation of so many friends - graduation - is the same event that motivates (at least in part) those left behind to be so self-focused. Because whether we like it or not, we too have to graduate one day. and if you're the child of my parents, in four years OR ELSE.
But if there is one other thing I know, it is that friendships, not classes or clubs, are ultimately what you walk away with after graduation. (Well, that and your diploma.)
Maybe, then, maintaining long-distance friendships is more important to our future, to graduation and beyond, than we might think. Let's not lose sight of what really matters. And to my friends gradu(08)ing: I promise to do better. I will really miss you!
Here's to you,
