cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by ePi.Longo
Yesterday morning I woke up feeling great and ready to take on the world. Lately, things have slowed down (in a good way) and you have those times in your life when you seem to hit your stride. I might be in one of those times.
Then I checked Facebook.
A good friend of mine wasn’t having one of those days. Unfortunately, a beloved pet of hers had a terrible accident and was in a severe condition. She was not doing well and I contacted her directly to check in and see how she was doing, not through a comment, but a personal message.
The odd thing to many, is that when I say “good friend”, this is someone I have met in person once, but have connected with several times through Twitter and Facebook and have got to know through social mediums more than the opportunity I have had to meet face-to-face. Friendships that are started and maintained through social media are becoming something normal to me. I always prefer face-to-face, but do not limit friendships to that.
Yet many times those connections that we build either online or offline, get pushed aside for the busy times that we have in life. We spend a lot of time doing what we do, connected in our own world, and we lose touch with some of those valued connections that we have built in our lives because we are lost in ourselves.
As I left this morning, I thought of her and checked her Facebook feed to see how her dog was doing only to find that her beloved pet had passed away. I stopped everything that I was doing and cried profusely, knowing how tough the loss of a pet is and wondering what I could do to help, knowing that there isn’t much from a far distance. It also hit me how we often only check in on people we see that something is wrong, yet pay little attention when seems to be going right.
We can stop our lives instantly to help a friend in need, yet you often hear things like “I could care less what someone had for breakfast”, when it comes to social media. Yet those little “shares” help us to build those strong connections in the first place. The constant sharing of my own pets may not be something that connects to everyone, nor do the masses find appealing, but it does create a deep connection with few. I have purposely started to filter those “meaningless” tweets and updates from others as I felt I have been too busy to keep up with it, and wanted only the shares related to my field, but why? Those little glimpses into someone else’s life were the things that brought me initially close to so many people.
Maybe when we start to care about those little happy moments that others share so openly, it shows the importance of the connections that we have made, and that we are not only there in “bad”, but also to help them “savour” the good.
Maybe we need to pay a little more attention to what someone had for breakfast.
Maybe it just says we care.
