When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want? Will you hug that college degree in that walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to your garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in reading your financial statement? Or course not. What will matter most then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn’t they matter now?
When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want? Will you hug that college degree in that walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to your garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in reading your financial statement? Or course not. What will matter most then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn’t they matter now?
MAX LUCADO
People are quick to find their deeper satisfaction in material items. Our society breeds this in each of us. We are hunter/gatherers working at a frenetic pace to spot our prey, take it down and bring it back to the home for saving, appreciating and aggregating.
In the course of this madness to acquire stuff, we encounter many interesting people who help us, guide us, teach us, love us, care for us, befriend us, counsel us, and so much more. These kinds of people are giving of themselves (in most cases, selflessly) in order that they may bring value, experience and positive energy into our lives. We do not collect these people, and rarely pay for them. They are an aggregation over the course of a lifetime that comes from many different connections, experiences and circumstances. When they appear in our world, sometimes it comes with great fanfare (as in the birth of a child). Other times, they are the person sitting next to you at a seminar, with whom you choose to chat and 20 years later, you look back and discover how incredibly important they have become to you.
The older you get, (assuming you are not infected with the I must have EVERYTHING complex), you discover that all the trinkets you are acquiring are nice to have and great to look at and are (perhaps) a great investment. But you will not be calling for any of them on your deathbed (unless you name them, Rosebud… but that is another film entirely). The things that matter are relationships. They drive our lives through a host of twists and turns, good and bad, that give each of us opportunity to grow, learn, and (hopefully) evolve.
Humans need connectivity with others. They add such value to our lives that when collected, far exceed the value of any item, trinket, investment, residence, business or vehicle. There may be a time in your life where you feel that flying in a G5 private jet would outweigh any relationship you might ever have, but to Max’s point, the day may come where you are fully immobilized and that jet is nothing to you in a hospital room. But having someone to hug you and love you in that moment will mean everything.
Many treat relationships as expendable. They jump from person to person and circumstance to circumstance like a toad in a pond of lily pads. Each encounter is brief, intentionally limited and void of the depth that gives true meaning to a genuine relationship of any kind. These people, (for a host of reasons) are not finding true value in human connectivity. They are trained in seizing small value experiences and “feeding” off of them for as long as their interest/desire dictates, and then it is off to the next conquest.
I spend time daily writing these paragraphs to send to each of you. I do this because I value you, and use this exercise as my cause and reason to maintain connectivity daily.
#friendsmatter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFSjHBVx-xk
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