Of intent...

It's been such an awful time, and work has managed to camouflage it all really well. My mum waited a few days to talk to me cause I was either sitting on the seniors' side of the floor and couldn't talk beyond a whisper or cause it was too late my time by the time she got out of her signal disrupting local train journeys in the evening. And there's others who tried getting through, got told i'd call back and never did.

But there's still others I'd make time for. Not even people I manage and get paid to make time for. But people that I have the "intent" for.

Like the Penguin. There's always one random conversation through the day that we do on the phone. There's times I tell her i'll call back, and sometimes 5 hours pass by the time I do, but I do. I call. Cause the intent is there.

Or N, who sits across the floor from me, also on the seniors side of the floor. And even through my busiest days there's still always 5 minutes where I walk over and sit cross-legged on his desk and take the time to catch up. Intent.

Too many friends who went to b-school have demonstrated how they get sucked into a warp of activity. That little zone of familiar people, of busy days and schedules that makes the outside world fade into oblivion. That delusion of being in a society/ neighborhood for life.

Unless there's intent of course.

People have made relationships survive even through these phases. And maintained friendships. Not cause they could. But cause they wanted to. And of course various commitments took up various degrees of time and energy. But it always took intent to fuel any investment of either.

While in b-school, I once asked my future telling friend how long my closest friend, SP, would stay in my life (cause I'd started to see how I was pushing her away as the terms progressed, and it bothered me that I seemed to have little intent to keep our once wonderful friendship going) and he told me "As long as you'll want her to".

It really was as simple as that. Intent. Ironic that S is today in the same bschool I went to, and we're going through a role reversal of sorts, and now having wised up to this bschool routine, I'm just calmly biding my time for the day that she indicates she's ready to have me back in her life. It'd be so easy to doubt her intent, had we not had all that time together before we parted ways. But now, we've seen enough to inspire faith in me about my place in her life.

What I think I started out saying, and lost somewhere in deliberate meandering of prose, is that regardless of how busy, how stressed or how crazy we think our lives are, if we're not able to accommodate some people, it's likely cause we don't want it badly enough. (No, I don't enjoy the conflict ridden conversations I have with my mom these days, and let me not even get into the issue of the "other" people I'm 'avoiding').

Conversely, if we're constantly making space and time for some others, even looking forward to investing that space and time in them, it's a sign of something bigger, hopefully better. We're lucky to feel intent at all. And for that, I hope we're being thankful.