Last week I went to Finland to attend my brother Bernhard’s wedding, and spend a week getting to know the family of his (now) wife and see my family before I move to Honduras. It was a wonderful holiday, I absolutely love Finland and the new addition to our family, Elisa, is extremely lovable.
The first few nights we spent with Bernhard’s new family in law’s summer house by a lake, on an island in the sea, in the middle of a wood. Then we all went back to Helsinki to help my brother with preparations for the wedding, welcome additional family members to Helsinki and get to know the city a little bit better.
In Helsinki I stayed with one of my best friends in the world. Anna. I consider her a soul mate and she is the first person I turn to when there is big news in my life. But we have lost most of our usual tracks of communication. We used to write long letters to each other, usually several A4 sheets of pages long, we used to Skype fairly regularly and whenever there was a long spell of non communication we would write very long e-mails to each other updating the other one and expressing outrage at the long silence. But now we have had much longer spells of silence and we don’t seem to compensate them with long e-mails anymore.
We concluded that this must change. It can’t be that we spend many hours on the internet every day and not find the time to e-mail, Skype or at least Facebook message the other to give a sign of life. We talked about whether the internet is really facilitating communication between people, or if it just makes every relationship the same kind of distant. Because I am in contact with people on Facebook that I would normally not keep in touch with on a regular basis, just because I am not close to them. But I hear or read about very close friends almost just as much.
I love the internet and Facebook and it IS a great way to communicate and keep in touch with people you would normally not hear from. But I do not want it to take away time from the most important people in my life!
