Keep Your Friends Close and Family Closer

In my time spent living in my car, and now has a single man starting over from scratch, I have found myself spending an exorbitant amount of time in coffee shops. Sitting alone in these coffee shops I often find myself overhearing (or as some may call it, eavesdropping) the conversations around me. These days of course a lot of the conversations center around the ongoing disaster in Japan. The speed at which the disaster occurred, the sudden and massive loss of life, the impact of the nuclear plant meltdown, and then, more often then not, the comment that we are so lucky it is not us.

These conversations do hit close to my heart as I have a friend who was hours away from being in the area destroyed by the tsunami, and who lost family members – there one moment and gone the next. While she is working in China I spent some time with her father here, and it was hard to listen to just how overwhelming the impact has been entire communities around the world.

What does this have to do with my ongoing rants about animal hoarding, spousal assault on men, and many of the other things I have been ranting about? Nothing.... and everything. I am obviously taking the steps to move forward with my life, get my feet back under me, and growing again, and my blog will follow. But here is how it has everything to do with the things I have been experiencing in life.

So many of us live in pursuit of the finer things in life. We live in a a culture of privilege and plenty. We are not satisfied with a small starter home, instead we finance our lives away to get the perfect home. We fill that home with toys and goodies, much of which has been financed, and each of the family members hangs out in their separate rooms, seeing each other when they meet at the refrigerator and fight for the last can of coke. We have two, or three, or more vehicles, because we can't cooperate enough with other family members to get places together, or we live such separate lives that we just go in separate directions. I am, unfortunately, just as guilty as many in living my life like this.

I find myself writing about this because of the numerous times I have heard people follow their conversations about the Japan disaster with conversations about separation and divorce, often with finances at the root of the problem. Others talk about moving on with their lives because they want to do something new or different, and the friends and family they will be leaving behind really play no bearing in their decisions. I have been guilty of this to.

The sad thing is that when it gets down to the nitty gritty, you can own a mansion, you can have 5 cars, you can have your ranch and dozens of animals, but none of this, absolutely none of this is worth giving up friends and family for. People should be our priority – plain and simple. When there is nothing else, no cash in the bank, no roof over our head, no food on the table, the only thing there for us is friends and family, and we owe it to them to be there for them. Our priorities are screwed up when we choose things over people, when we work our lives away paying for things financed that we don't really need, just want.

My friend who lost several family members in the Japan disaster recently posted the following on Facebook;
“As I mourn over my recent loss of family I find myself thinking of others who have family, friends, and loved ones that we allow to be estranged or put out of our lives. Keep them close, love them everyday irregardless, care for them as if they are part of you, for they may be gone in a moment.”

I couldn't agree more.

Keep your friends close – Keep you family closer – and get your priorities straight.