World Hello Day takes place on the 21st of November. I heard this on the radio and I thought about two situations:
When I was a child, I would travel with my parents to the countryside. On the way, passing through the village, we had to greet every person we saw. They would greet us back. We did not know each other; however, it was something in the nature of things to greet and to answer.
Nowadays, we write emails, and a lot of text messages. Our way of communication has changed. We talk less on the phone, we see each other less, we write more. Maybe we want to give the other person room for thought, may to be more efficient with time, being more comfortable, and many other reasons.
An email is like a greeting in writing. Sometimes we pretend that we do not notice the greeting or that there is so much noise around that some greetings get lost. However, it often happens that some people won’t respond to a greeting. Thus, the response becomes an exception, rather than the norm. I often heard people say that colleagues they worked with for years will not reply to their emails, to WhatsApp messages; others reply after weeks or months.
Is the world so busy that we do not have time to be polite? And so self-absorbed that we forget to say hello? Is common sense a characteristic on the brink of extinction? Or are few others and I from an increasingly alien world?
I met people who always answered my emails, messages. Many of them were foreigners, CEOs of different companies. I know a few Romanians who, no matter how high the corporate ladder, reply; maybe not immediately, maybe not the same day, but always in a few days. It is not about how busy we are, or how full of responsibilities we are; it is about a way of doing things, it is about the respect for oneself and others.
I propose that today, on Hello Day, we remind ourselves of some relational hygienic rules and of the importance of simple gestures.