Sadness at the passage of time . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
Travelling to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan has been an interesting, if at times somewhat hair-raising experience, but today I had to face something which I had been shying away from for quite some time – checking my e-mail contacts and deleting those who no longer responded. The response for these latter is a bland "delivery failure notice" which tells you nothing, except perhaps that if those people are still online, they are no longer using the same address. :sherlock:
Back in Wales and England, I had several ISP accounts and of course, at least one e-mail address corresponding to each. But when I decided to leave the UK and live the life of an ex-pat, things changed. E-mail had of necessity to be web-based rather than ISP-based, and a multitude of accounts created problems. And as it is now almost three years since I left England, things have changed; people move on, residences and ISPs change and you lose contact with them. :faint:
It is with respect to my friends in Japan that I feel this most keenly. When I was working for the Ministry of Defence in Wales, and the idea of leaving the UK to teach English abroad finally crystallised (with a sense of impending doom, as the MoD was closing down the places where I was working), I first made contact with as many e-mail friends as I could in Japan and this led, eventually, to me going there and having a job interview. :cheers:
In the end I went to Taiwan and now Korea instead, but the important point was that my friends in Japan were the ones who made me feel much better about myself as a person with some intrinsic worth; being from another place allowed them to see me differently while I was still in Wales and England, and I still value this. So this passage of time and the coming of the inevitable is a deeply troubling experience; losing friends whom I may never see again, which feels almost as if they have died. I do not like this feeling! :worried:
So I am deleting addresses from my various address books knowing that these friends are "lost" forever and I may never see them again, a difficult and painful task. 😥
Does anyone else feel this way?
Andrew. v_v
