I just realized that Father’s Day is quickly approaching. This is a day that I’ve never felt pertains to me: this is a day for my own dad and always has been; it is not for me.
There is the idea in our society that during holidays we all must buy something, or at least buy a card to send. To be honest, I’m tired of all this mindless buying and gifting. Most have enough stuff already. And it is my opinion that if you think someone would really like a certain gift, go ahead and send it to them, there is no need to wait for some specific occasion to do that.
For me, the most important gift someone could give me is their time; time is what is really in short supply these days. The majority of people in our society are ‘busy’ because they’ve created a ‘busy’ life for themselves there they have to go do this and have to go do that. There are many things people do not ‘have’ to do but their minds are trained that they must continually be doing something. These people feel rather uncomfortable alone with their own thoughts and so they need continual distractions.
For someone to take the time to spend with you really is a gift. When people cannot because they are ‘busy’ this means that you are simply not important enough to them; all the other tasks they’ve busied themselves with are more important than you. Spending time in person is one thing but in recent times it has become rare for people to even spend time on a phone call catching up. Phone calls are more of a commitment than a text and so I’ve found that most will still do others the polite courtesy of a text message but only if a person resides in the upper echelons of importance to another will they be granted an actual phone call or *gasp* an in-person visit.
This is easy to demonstrate with friends and even sometimes with family members. There are times when I’ve written friends or left messages and some never do respond – this puts them off the friend list. However, there are others who do respond and these turn out to be your good friends.
So I’d really like to dispense with all this buying – it seems in the USA the occasion where you’re expected to buy something is always just around the corner and it has become tiring. Spending time with another is the way to go and that really shows they matter to you.
