It’s not quite “I am loved, I am loved…” But a friend who I catch up with on Facebook, and who lives a long way away, told me that she’d been reading my blog. And she liked it!
Hurrah for those little encouragements friends can bring. I’d been tiring a bit of Facebook recently – not much new, too many car races to upgrade my virtual car etc. (It’s much easier to own a car on Facebook. You don’t need refresher lessons for one thing.)
Tonight, I go on, and there’s a lot more to read. Maybe it’s been one of those weeks for others, and having reached the weekend, they’re letting off steam online. Although another has been letting off steam with piles of baking (which is more realistically generating steam, I’m sure), so she’s entitled to a small sit down.
E M Forster was the one with the famous phrase “Only connect”. It came in a fairly dystopian story, if I remember rightly. Our English teacher duly underlined the quote. All this when there were a few computers about the place, but the Internet was in the hands of geeks, and certainly the concept of connecting was much more about face to face, phone call to phone call.
So, online connecting. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be on Facebook otherwise. Or emailing people. Sometimes, I guess, the virtual doesn’t quite satisfy.
But at other times…when would I find the time to email my friends about my little ideas, to encourage them in their own worlds? Particularly when those worlds are further away from my own. As people move away, lives overlap less, even this level of connecting is good.
There’s a verse that has been going around my head recently – coming from the time when I would write a daily diary, and add a quote at the start of each entry. I hope I’ve remembered it correctly:
“Sometimes the writer says
To hell with words
And longs to dig ditches. She writes of this longing,
and you, because you are her friend,
Write back.” [Erica Jong]
Online communication. It helps you know you’re not alone.  And sometimes, it helps us to respond to each other, out of very ordinary circumstances, and find a moment of connection. Amen to that.