Dear Reader:
You know you are getting old… when you begin to fear that future generations will never be able to read first-hand historical documents because they can’t write or read cursive.
You know you are getting old…when you fear that your grandchildren will never have the opportunity to experience finding a love letter from an old boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse because young people rarely write letters today.
You know you are getting old…when you cringe at all the misspelled words in an email. Children and young people are learning weird abbreviations instead of spelling, so their communication (email/text, etc.) looks more like some kind of foreign Morse Code than it does a note.
You know you are getting old….when you miss being able to read someone’s face to identify their real emotions about a problem rather than try to decipher their true feelings from an email or text. The absence of touch to heal hurt feelings or disappointments worries me. We all need someone to hold or hug us and say “SHHH now…it will all be alright.”
Last night on HGTV’s Fixer Upper Chip and Jo were fixing up an old home to look like a rustic farm house with all modern amenities added. The last thing she did before showing the house was put a wooden plaque over the mantle that read simply: GATHER.
Don’t some words convey such power of emotion.…especially when standing alone. Gather to me means being close, being together. It is being able to sit down and have a meaningful, perhaps even memorable, conversation with a friend, adult child, or grandchildren.
I fear for the young generations coming along because they really believe it is easier for them to have cyberspace relationships than real ones. It is like settling for a synthetic blouse over a 100% cotton one.
A young writer by the name of Krysti Wilkinson in her article “We Are the Generation that Doesn’t Want Relationships” (Huffington Post) concludes her thoughts with this sad statement:
…When things get too close to being real, we run. We hide. We leave. There’s always more fish in the sea. There’s always another chance at finding love. There’s just such a little chance of keeping it these days.
…We want a placeholder, not a person. We want a warm body, not a partner. We want someone to sit on the couch next to us, as we aimlessly scroll through another newsfeed, open another app to distract us from our lives. We want to walk this middle line: pretending we don’t have emotions while wearing our heart on our sleeve, wanting to be needed by someone yet not wanting to need someone.
We play hard to get just to test if someone will play hard enough – we don’t even fully understand it ourselves. We sit around with friends discussing the rules, but no one even knows the game we’re trying to play. Because the problem with our generation not wanting relationships is that, at the end of the day, we actually do.
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So until tomorrow….Take the opportunity to “gather” whenever you can with friends and family. The only way to build strong relationships is in person….be there.
“Today is my favorite day” Winnie the Pooh
*I discovered this cute picture on Mollie’s (Facebook) Beauty Counter Momma website….love it!
A family that masks together detoxes together! Y’all this mask is amazing! I could feel it working within seconds of applying it. It feels tingly, cool, and refreshing! Work baby work, release those toxins! My husband found it refreshing too!
PS. This mask is not for children. Hence only a spot on Rut’s nose real quick.
