Presence

This morning, I was thinking about something that has become such a normal part of how I communicate with people in this new age of mobile phones and all.

There’s a young lady I’ve been talking to for a few weeks now. She’s actually my birthday mate. She was born on the 23rd of August too, just like me. She was born in 1996 and I was born in 1982, so technically, we are birthday mates with a few years in between.

And somewhere in our conversations, I realised that we are actually the same kind of human being. And I thought, Wait… could we actually be twins? Smiles… She likes to spend time with herself, yeah, She enjoys her own company. She reads books. She doesn’t go out much…

Since our birthday this year, we’ve been going back and forth, chatting… our conversations have been funny because sometimes she replies late, sometimes I reply late. It’s just been this back and forth thing.

Last night I got a late reply from her, a reply that was about 5 days late. She added an apology; “I’m sorry for the late reply.”

When I saw it I told her, “It’s fine. It’s okay.”

Then I explained to her why it was fine. I actually explained it to her because I felt she would understand exactly what I meant.

I told her that I save my precious chats and respond to them when I’m calmer and less stressed…

If I see your message when I’m in transit, at work, rushing somewhere, overwhelmed, or just mentally all over the place, I may read it and unconsciously forget to respond.
This is not because I don’t care. It’s kind of hard to respond in certain hours or activities of the day.

So I may not respond because I actually care.

There are some conversations I don’t want to have in between two other things. I don’t want to open your message while I’m rushing and give you a half-hearted response simply because I happened to see it.

I want to sit down with it, to read it properly, and to think about what you said… And then I want to respond in the way I would have responded if I had all the time and calmness in the world.

I don’t remember exactly who taught me this, but I know I picked it up from someone. They told me they don’t open certain chats until they are ready to attend to them.

And I thought, Hmm. That makes sense.

So I started doing it too.

I save my chats.

Especially the precious ones.

And then I come back to them when I can actually be present.

The funny thing is, I don’t think people always understand this about me.

Because when you don’t reply immediately, people sometimes assume you’re ignoring them. Or that you’re not interested. Or that they’re not important enough.

But sometimes the opposite is true.

Sometimes, you are important enough for me to say, I don’t want to answer you anyhow.

I want to give you my proper response.

I want to be calm when I talk to you.

I want to have the mental space to actually hear what you’re saying instead of just reacting because your message landed on my phone at the wrong time.

And maybe that’s why I’ve become quite comfortable with delayed replies too.

I don’t need you to respond to me immediately.

I have learned that people have lives outside of their phones. People are working. Driving. Thinking. Resting. Dealing with things I may know nothing about.

So if you take your time to respond to me, I’m okay.

Maybe I’ve just realised that I want people to give me the same grace I give them.

Author: Emaistace

wife, mom, sister, daughter, aunty, friend. writing my everyday thoughts as they pop up. View all posts by Emaistace