‘We must catch up.’ Why don’t we?

“We must catch up.”

I say those four words often, and I always mean them, whether I’m saying them to a former pupil, an old colleague or a relative I haven’t seen for far too long. Then the days fill up, life gets busy and, somehow, the meeting doesn’t happen.

In Dubai, this is almost a way of life. Most of us live far from where we began, and our friends and family are scattered all over the world. We are very good at making the promise. We are rather less good at finding the time to keep it.

Every year, a couple from Allahabad come down to Dubai, and every year we meet. It is never in doubt. They have a date on their ticket, so we have a date in the diary.

There are a couple of dear friends who live not far from us, whom we haven’t managed to meet in far too long.

Think about that. We always find an evening for friends who have travelled thousands of kilometres to see us, yet somehow we can’t find one for friends who live a short drive away. Distance isn’t the problem. The deadline is.

I have come to think that the people who matter most to us are often the ones who ask the least of us. The couple from Allahabad arrive with a return flight and a fixed date. The couple nearby come with “anytime”, and “anytime” is probably the easiest thing in the world to postpone.

An old friend doesn’t send a reminder, doesn’t chase and doesn’t sulk. Work has deadlines, school has term dates and every notification on my phone seems to want an answer today. Old friendships have no deadline at all, and so they quietly lose out to everything that does.

And yet the friendships themselves rarely fade. When we finally sit down together, it feels as though we were only together last week. The old stories get their old laughs, hours disappear and we part with complete sincerity, saying, “We really must do this more often.”

Then another long gap follows.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was a boy in Allahabad, most of the things that mattered needed no appointment. A friend didn’t message to ask whether Tuesday at 5.30 would work. At seven in the morning, two-thirty on a blazing summer afternoon or eight on a cold winter evening, a knock on the door simply meant that somebody had arrived. The kettle went on, tea appeared and a visit that was meant to last half an hour could easily stretch into two.

I remember winter afternoons under a tree with friends, eating peanuts, drinking tea, playing marbles and carrom. We weren’t catching up; we were simply together.

Life wasn’t necessarily easier then. People had worries too. But there seemed to be more room around them, and perhaps more time for the things that didn’t have to be planned.

The spontaneity of life has shrunk. These days, almost everything needs a plan: a message, a slot in the diary and a time that suits both sides. The unannounced knock on the door, the visit that turns into an evening and the friend who simply drops in have all but disappeared.

My mother had more friends than I do. She lived in Allahabad, and her days were full of people, with someone always dropping in. When she came to visit us in Dubai, she often felt bored. We never did. Our days were full too, but they were full of work, schedules and screens, with hardly anyone coming through the door. Busy, I have come to realise, is not the same as full.

We have FaceTime, BOTIM and WhatsApp, and we can see someone thousands of kilometres away within seconds. But a heart emoji is not a cup of tea. Staying in touch is not the same as being together, sharing a laugh across a table, with no “Can you hear me?” and no temptation to glance at another message.

So perhaps the fix is simple, though not always easy. If old friends will never demand our time, we must offer it. We don’t need a huge social circle or a diary packed with engagements. We simply need to decide who matters and give them a date, as if they were flying in tomorrow.

It could be a cup of tea, a game of tombola or a couple of hours of complete nonsense. Nothing particularly important may happen, and yet we go home lighter, happier and reminded of why we wanted to meet in the first place.

Old friendships don’t disappear when we stop seeing each other. They wait patiently in the background, ready to pick up exactly where we left off. They just won’t remind us.

So here is a small challenge. Before you close this page, think of the friend who lives nearest and whom you have seen least. Don’t just send a message saying, “We must catch up.” Pick up the phone, fix a date this week and put it in the diary.

The next time you say, “We must catch up,” mean it.

And then catch up.

Michael Guzder is Executive Vice-President, Education at GEMS