FaceTime

I was out visiting 2 old folks who are recuperating with 3 other friends from church. One remark struck me. It came from a friend of mine became a Christian some years back and she's in her 60s. She said that she wished her grandma had such kind of support (visits) in her last years. She said one nice thing that she has discovered being a Christian is the fellowship that we share.... that the aged and infirm have visitors dropping by regularly. It can be quite depressing to be cooped up by 4 walls and you are stuck there because of your failing physical ability.

Real face time.... I think all of us have this need to interact. There is this need for companionship. Man is a social creature. No man is an island.... Some of us may claim we are loners but I think most of us crave some form of interaction one time or the other.

Yet, this need for interaction is often overlooked and overwhelmed. Busy lives, the Internet, changing norms and mores..... these are some of the problems that seem to change the way we interact. Social networking via the Internet may have changed the way we interact and we seem more interconnected than ever in many sense. But therein lies a different set of challenge too. It tends to lose that personal touch, that face-to-face experience. Technology may even allow a hand to appear from the screen one day to seemingly touch you but I think it cannot replace the actual presence. If that pseudo hand were to be able to replace that actual presence, I guess we might as well hand over our lives to the machines to be run.

Yet the way we look at interaction is also affected by our genders. Women generally tend to be more sympathetic, caring, more ready to embrace the different situations... I have been feeling a bit under the weather the past week. So after the visitation, and picking up my girl from piano, I got home feeling really tired. I nagged Son for not having the common sense to boil water to fill up the water container. His reply was why go after him since I was the one who still went out for the visitation even though I was feeling tired. I used to get that some what too from Other Half for doing things that the felt I 'needn't' have assumed.... Men and women view such things differently. But I'll leave the mechanics of this from my perspective for another rambling.

At my age, our schedule features in the way we interact. Kids, spouses, jobs... they affect how we are able to interact. There are some of us who are blessed enough to have church support to fulfill the need for interaction. Some of us work and we get our fix of interaction there. The young people will probably tell us that there is the Net to see to that need. Young people have an even greater appetite for interaction. I nag my boy for interspersing his study time with chats and tweets. A man and woman... we tend to view such things differently. Different lenses we have.

As for the visits... I am told that it's a highlight of the day for them... the noise, the conversations... I guess it's just the presence of people around that seems to brighten one's day. For many of us, this might not be something which we can quite fully understand perhaps since we still have mobility... But to be able to interact, share moments with another person, I think that's part of the bigger picture too. Real face time!