Guessing

This morning I got a text message from the girl I had coffee with almost a month ago. It’s the first I’ve heard from her since I tried calling and text-messaging her a couple of times about three weeks ago. The question is, why did she bother getting back to me at all? After about a week of waiting for a reply and not getting one, I expected never to hear from her again and then this morning she sent me a text message. In the message she apologised for taking so long to get back to me and explained that she has been very busy over the past few weeks.

’I’ve been busy’ is a funny sort of excuse. It gets used quite a bit by people when they’re trying to explain why they haven’t done something. It’s a kind of generic reason for not doing something. Often it’s the excuse people use when they haven’t done something that they really didn’t want to do in the first place and it’s a polite way of not saying so. I’m not saying people don’t get busy or even that this girl wasn’t really busy and that she’s making it up but, really, you have to be pretty busy to not call or message someone for almost three weeks. I think that if you take that long to get back to someone you probably don’t want to get back to them at all, whether you’re aware of it or not.

To be fair, I often take a few weeks to reply to e-mails and this doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep in touch with my friends. I like to write long e-mails to my friends and I have to be in the right frame of mind to do so. As of right now there are probably three or four e-mails in my inbox that I’ve been meaning to reply to for a few weeks but I just haven’t got around to it yet. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to write back, it just means I can be lazy about e-mailing people sometimes.

So maybe I can’t read too much into not hearing from the girl for three weeks. Maybe she really has been so busy that she hasn’t had time to call any of her friends. Or maybe she didn’t want to speak to me again but felt guilty about ignoring me completely so she decided she’d send me a message to say hi. I don’t know what she’s thinking and it’s pointless to try and guess. I waste a lot of energy speculating about this sort of stuff and I spend far too much time trying to figure out what people are thinking. When you think about it, what’s the point of doing that? Even if you convince yourself that you know what someone else is thinking, you still don’t really know. It’s probably much better to approach things the complete opposite way, assume you don’t know anything about what other people are thinking (which is the truth most of the time) and just do what you want to do. If you try to read too much into things, your assumptions will just end up holding you back. I know.