A Certain Irony

(Before you read further I need to stress that the friend referred to in this blog is, indeed, a friend. If he ever reads my blog, he may wonder, but I really do consider him a friend. Really. I just found the following incident ironic.)

A couple of weeks ago I received one of those forwarded e-mails from a friend of mine. It was entitled, "Too Busy for a Friend." It told a story, real or imagined, of a teacher who assigned each student the task of writing down the names of the other students on a piece of paper and then writing the nicest thing they could say about that student. The teacher collected the papers and the following day passed back to each student what their classmates had written about them. The students were surprised and pleased with what their classmates had written. As the story unfolds one of the students is killed in Viet Nam and at the funeral the deceased's parents pull the teacher aside to tell her that the student had carried that paper in his wallet all those years. One by one the classmates tell her that they, too, have carried that paper with them and have read it time and again.

The e-mail closes with these words, "So please, tell the people you love and care for, that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late. And one way to accomplish this is: forward this message on. If you do not send it, you will have, once again passed up the wonderful opportunity to do something nice and beautiful. If you've received this, it is because someone cares for you and it means there is probably at least someone for whom you care. If you're 'too busy' to take those few minutes right now to forward this message on, would this be the VERY first time you didn't do that little thing that would make a difference in your relationships? The more people that you send this to, the better you'll be at reaching out to those you care about."

Now here is the irony for me. I would have felt more appreciated if he had actually taken a moment to write something nice about me to me. He thought of me, yes, but what did he think about me? The closing of the e-mail intimates that he thinks I am "special and important", but why? Maybe I have a different Love Language, but I didn't feel particularly special or important since I'm technologically savvy enough to know he may have forwarded this to everyone on his e-mail list in less than a second. (Fortunately he BCC'd me so I didn't have a list to scroll through before I got to the forwarded e-mail. The downside is I also don't know if he sent it only to me because I am so "special and important" or if he included everyone in his address book.) I wish he'd taken a minute to actually replicate the real or imagined scenario and written "the nicest thing he could say" about me. Maybe he was "too busy".