A Side Effect Of The Passage Of Time

From our recent correspondence:

[My friend is] also the person who has known me longest and most closely who is still alive — and therefore with whom I have the greatest communication bandwidth: a few words get across a great deal of meaning (i.e., I don’t have to stop and explain things to him: he was there, or already knows of them, and a word or two suffices to refer to all that).  As you get older, having to explain things or else risk being misunderstood (or ignored) gets to be more and more of a strain on conversation, complicated by the current trend of no one listening to anything, no matter who is talking, for longer than 10 seconds at a time — and you’re lucky to get that much.

Eventually, not many people much younger than you are care what you have to say, even when you know it’s vitally important, for them as well as for you — and, all too often, those few who do aren’t willing to go through all the background explanations that are required to bring them up to speed to actually hear and understand your intended meaning. Inevitably, some of those explanations take the form of recalled events or anecdotes from your past, at which point some people inevitably decide (erroneously) that you’re living in the past or starting to ‘lose it.’

So, after a while, you start really missing the people who can actually hear what you’re saying — or who are interested enough to wait around long enough  — a minute or two? — for you to finish saying it.

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