keep in touch with friends and family

I think I’ve been doing well at this over the past year or so. Got back in touch with some friends I’d lost contact with. Made more of an effort to try to e-mail/talk to loved ones on a regular basis. It wasn’t always as satisfying as I hoped. Sometimes talking or visiting with people you care for is energising and joyful, but not always. Sometimes people’s responses are less than enthusiastic (I guess that’s karma coming back to bite me in the ass for all the years of semi-neglect). In at least one case, a “friend” complained to someone else that I don’t really keep in contact with her, when, if you look at it, 95% of the times that we’ve conversed in the past year, it’s been me calling her, not her calling me, and just about every time we talk, it’s me asking what’s up with her and expressing an interest in what’s going on in her life, as opposed to her showing any interest whatsoever in mine. But, I guess with some folk you just can’t win. I’m not going to let her break my stride.

The best thing about working on this goal has been that I have developed a real appreciation for my friends and family. Keeping in touch isn’t just something I feel I should do, it’s now something I take pleasure in doing, because the folk I love bring so much joy into my life.

I’m doing much better with this, but that may just be because it’s Christmas time. The test will be whether I can keep it up well into the new year.

This is one of those goals that I’ve had for years; I’ll make some small progress over a short period of time and then backslide big time. I’m making incremental progress overall, but it’s very incremental. Anyway, I’m giving it a go again. This time, I’m tracking it using Joe’s Goals, and my aim is to phone/visit/e-mail/write to, at least once each week, someone I care for (other than the few people that I already contact regularly). I’m hoping that having a visible way to track my progress (or delinquency) will help me to improve. I’m going to try that for three or four months, and see what happens.

I’ve been doing a bit better at this recently. Still plenty of progress to be made, but I’m getting more regular with phone calls and e-mails. I think that working on this goal has been good for me; left to my own devices, I tend to be somewhat introverted/solitary but communicating with my loved ones more often has reminded me how much regular human contact can do to lift my spirits.

I am terrible at this, no matter how hard I try, no matter how good my intentions are. That being said, I send off about half-dozen quick e-mails today to people I haven’t been in touch with for a while, and I got an almost instant reply to one of them. I got all happy and excited about that, and it reminded me why this goal is so important. I’ve got to get my act together with this one, because I would really hate to find that I’ve fallen out of contact with people I care for, purely through my own neglect and procrastination.