I miss my friends, I miss Uncle Joseph and his stories, I miss the culture, I miss tea time. Since I have been home I have come to the realization that people tend to be consumed with their own lives. One particular way I have seen this in through the social networking system called Facebook, and Twitter for that matter. People make these profiles that consist of pictures that people take of themselves standing in front of a mirror, or that they held their camera up a foot away from their face of their good side so everyone can see the perfect blemishless face. Yes, I just made up that word. They post about what they are doing on a daily basis for the whole world to see gathering as many "friends" as they can to comment and pretend they care about their lives. When the reality is that they haven't actually physically talked to that person in years and these social networking websites have given us an excuse to put off relationship building the way it was meant to be.
Going to Mali showed me how important quality time together is. To be in relation with someone means to have "an existing connection; a significant association between or among things: the relation between cause and effect." How can there be cause and effect without physical contact. Take this picture for example:
"To be specific, consider a marble at rest in a curved space-time, as in Figure 1. If at rest, it must remain at rest unless some force acts on it. We are told to visualize that the marble will tend to roll downhill, and this is how 'curved space-time' produces the effect we call gravity. However, from a causality perspective, if the rubber sheet or 'curved space-time' were located in space without gravity already present under the sheet, the marble would just stay in place on the side of the hill. The existence of curvature, even when time is involved in the curvature, is not a cause of motion. Only a 'force' (a conveyor of momentum) can induce new motion. The force is the proximate cause." Borrowed from: http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/PhysicsHasItsPrinciples.asp
So what I am trying to say is that people are becoming so consumed with this life of social networking. Everyone here seems to be so consumed with their own lives and business that they forget how to have friends. If you hadn't noticed I had actually deleted my Facebook for a while and then had to continue reactivating it to contact certain people. It became very clear to me how obnoxious this was so I decided to conform to the popular fopa of social networking in order to stop annoying the people that I have not deleted.
Oh yeah, I deleted over a hundred or some friends. If your phone number is not in my phone, then you are not my friend on Facebook. One of the reasons I had deleted it before was because of the fact that I was tired of people contacting me only through Facebook. If you want to talk to me, call me. Texting is another thing that bothers me. It is not real. If I cannot see your face, at least let me hear your voice.
So here is my challenge for you:
Seek out a friend, call them. Ask them how they are. Find out what their favorite food is, make it, and invite them over. Build and grow in relation with them. Cause an effect in their life.
Speaking of relations and friendships: I received a phone call from my friend Moses. He and his wife had their baby. If you remember my post that I put a picture of the three of us and under that picture I wrote that "we joke about naming the baby after me." Well guess what, they did it! Her name is Kaeli Anne Traore. Anne is her grandmother's name and Kaeli is, of course, my name. This would have never happened had I not spent time with Moses and Dina. I will be receiving a picture soon and will be sure to scan it onto here for you to see.
