What does it mean to be in sync? Particularly with another person.

I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to connect with certain friends by phone. Just to say hello. For these particular friends, it’s not easy at all.

We often call each other’s voice mails, leaving these tiresome “Sorry I missed you” messages. It really gets old. I’ve started just hanging up and not bothering with the message anymore. Thinking they see my name on the calls received or ID, and let them figure the rest. After all, I have very few “urgent calls” that need to be explained in a long winded message that wouldn’t be served better in real time with a real person listening as we actually converse. I mean, isn’t that the point behind the phone call to begin? Isn’t that what communication is all about?

Hmmm. Well, maybe it isn’t anymore. Maybe people nowadays, or, shall I say certain demographic groups don’t communicate that way anymore.

We’ve all read and ruminated about the sound bite snippet culture that seems to overtake old norms of passing information, ideas, and just plain greetings to one another nowadays. Everything is either a facebook post, a text message line or two, or a clipped voice mail. Even those of us in older generations who remember the times of endless phone calls, late night rapathons and U.S. Mail, are now finding it hard to connect to one another.

Lots of us lose contact because we can’t catch up without actually making a plane reservation, driving to the destination home, or showing up by surprise. What’s happening? Is it just that so many of us are driven to do our thing so much more heavily now than before? Are we monopolized by families, and more locally accessible friends, distractions, and commitments, than our once close friends who may have moved out of town? And then, why is that a difference maker now, when the phone has been around a hundred and forty years? Why does no one want to talk on the phone anymore? Or, at best, only when it suits their timing perfectly?

Sometimes, I ask myself, is it simply a matter a timing? Of being in sync? Of both people being in some sort of serendipitous space where each of them has just the right amount of time to commit and invest at just the same time on a particular day? If that were the case, then the problem is different. Then, its about being in sync with someone. Could it be that they and I are just not made for good timing? Just for a phone call. Has this happened to you?

What do you sync?