four hours! my daughter asked me in amazement yesterday when i came home. you had lunch for four hours with your friends? my daughter is my mother now! she forgets that she has a full 7 hours with her friends everyday, for 5 days a week, whilst i meet no one day in and day out, travelling between one house to the other with no human interaction other than family members. i only have one 4-hours in months.

perhaps she has a mental vision of us eating non-stop for 4 hours, gobbling things down like turkeys. it is the human interaction that we all crave, i think. the chance to sit down and just chat about nothing in particular. what do we talk about for the 4 hours? topics ranging from morbid and serious dealing with reincarnation and sickness to senseless things like movies that we will see again and again, company logos, football (which just went over my head), crazy jokes and just mostly catching up on the latest with each other's lives. i can't remember half of the things we talk about. it is not the topic that is the focal point, it is taking time off to slow down.

sometimes even i wonder why my friends give me the time of the day. whenever i suggest lunch to catchup, the big bosses drop whatever they have on hand and give me the rest of the day. i feel honoured but why, i've often asked myself. i'm not the most interesting person to talk to, i'm not the most sociable and definitely not the most important. i'm regular run-of-the-mill-joe. lately, i'm not even funny. i think the answer lies in time. merely taking the time to just sit there, and talk about nothing in particular, sitting there whilst time drifts past, for us all who are trying so hard to live life right, it is really a rare opportunity. we all have our own fires to put out, our hurdles and obstacles, our own appointments to run to. rarely do we get a chance to sit down, do nothing, bother about nothing and just talk off the top of our brain. it doesn't matter if we have nothing to say, it doesn't matter if there is a lull of silence, being able to just sit there with no expectation, no pressure, no stress, it is why we have 4-hour lunches.

time is the most important thing that we can give others, in this day and age where everybody is so cold and always hurrying from one place to the next. where interaction is mostly through technology rather than good old face to face. time is the most precious gift. i feel blessed that i have friends, albeit the few, who will give me the time of their day.