19th January — 2023 was the first time I put my phone on silence mode, in a long time.
Today, it’s a norm, phones are most of the time on silent, especially the younger generation. However for almost 15 + years I never kept my phone on silence mode, only reason being is that my mom would call me.
Parents have this habit (annoying one would argue😊 ) to call and find out where their kids are, especially in the night. Whenever we have gone out, even when I was no longer technically a kid :), my mom would wake up in the night, check if I had left my wallet near her (that was our tell, that I am home) and if not, she would call me, where are you and when are you coming home ?
Be it 11 am or 2 Am, the call used to invariably come.
However the past few years the calls were of a different nature, I am not feeling well, please can you check, The oxygen seems to be not working, please come. Feeling cold, can you check the AC. The calls kept coming, with varied frequency, odd hours and requirements, until they stopped completely.
Today I do the same and I can see (hear) the exasperation from my kids when I am hounding them about where they are or when they will reach?. While I am sure they think that the old man has just lost it, I understand now more about those calls, maybe not little, but definitely a tad late.
A recent conversation with a friend and I realized that not “ everyone “ has friends or family who will call, speak and message to them, the hey how’s it going, the happy birthday & congratulations, the innocent fake forwards, the “ bhakt “ posts, repeated messages, the meme jokes and the misses.
Not everyone gets them, those who do, don’t really acknowledges them and most don’t appreciate them.
While those who do, but they have inadvertently put the “silence mode on”
A recent survey done to nurses show that one of the top 5 regrets of people on their death beds is “ I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends & family “
The nurses revealed that many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden relationships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving people the time and effort that they deserved “
While the phones now are perpetually silent, the notifications — watch messages, blue ticks, grey ticks have become tools to not really reply to anything & only when one really wants to, if it prioritizes at all.
Perhaps CJ Lewis was right when he wrote “Friendship is the love dismissed. “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves, “the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Why? Perhaps we know it’s the most time consuming, the least celebrated, the one we could live without. Perhaps too, as he added, “few value it because few experience it.
Its strange, people want to be remembered for so many things, being successful, the material wealth, how well one does, the victories and the memories, everything to become immortal, but to be the one who is there, for the other side.
The movie Wonder says something wonderful and it goes “ “The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honour heroes after they’ve died. They’re like the pyramids that the Egyptians built to honour the pharaohs. Only instead of being made of stone, they’re made out of the memories people have of you.”
For posterity sake, one should remember that the phone can be on silent, but keeping the ringer on is a choice — Celebrate your friends, families, your loved ones, the ones who are there for you.
One day maybe, you will realise that the phone may not ring at all.