Meditations on Keeping in Touch
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how I can do better with keeping in touch with my people. Honestly it shouldn’t be something that’s too difficult—but sometimes it can be.
I realize that it’s something primarily a function of my current position in life. Am I in school? Am I on break? Am I working on something intensely, is it something smaller that I working towards more long term?
It’s tough because sometimes I match the frequency of the other person, but sometimes I set the scene myself. There’s no right answer on how the interactions should be.
I ask myself quite regularly: am I being too annoying? Is the volume of the text messages too much? I ask myself this because I tend to use my own experience as a model for others; it has only been recently that I realize that this is not the best way to think at times—people’s world models are just so different fundamentally.
Sometimes I’ll see a huge block of text and feel overwhelmed. But if I see a voice memo, it might be a minute long but I won’t feel overwhelmed at all. Abstractly, there might be 3x more information in that memo than the block of text but psychologically I won’t feel as overwhelmed. Is this the case for others?
Do people enjoy spontaneous calls? FaceTimes? Reels? Snaps? Songs? There are so many modes of communication and it becomes overwhelming trying to understand the mechanics of each. But I know deep down that it shouldn’t be that way.
I miss the days when once I said goodbye to someone, that would be indeed the last contact until I saw them in-person again. I understand that the world has changed plastically and I’ll never be able to do this again.
Moving forward, regardless of anything written above, I’ll need to focus much more weight on consistent communication. I can no longer make the excuse of “I am busy” because we are all busy.
I’m doing a better job of acknowledging when I do slip, because I will also make mistakes. I think people appreciate just the acknowledgement and the apology versus not.
I’ll have to continuously gauge the other person’s energy and reciprocate it at their frequency. If I can do this consistently then I think I’ll be ok.
Lastly, I have to keep faith in the person on the other end. Life is uncertain so even I do catch their rhythm, it may dissolve at any time. To always remember the times we spent in-person together and to keep trust that they remember too.