Quality of Life: Relationships

May 25th, 2011

I’ll begin with a simple truism…

The quality of our lives is defined in large part by how and where and with whom we spend our time, God’s first and greatest gift to each of us.

Throughout the millennia we’ve always invested our time pretty much the same way: in pursuit of the many and varied relationships that together constitute the fabrics of our lives. We have relationships with God, relationships with family, relationships with other people, relationships with authority, relationships with the earth and the other species that populate it, relationships with community, relationships with work, relationships with money, relationships with food, relationships with our bodies, relationships with institutions, relationships with art, relationships with our passions, relationships with our toys, relationships with our creditors, relationships with our technologies, and relationships with our obsessions and addictions. Life is an increasingly complex tapestry of interwoven relationships, each of which – for better or worse – demands a measure of our time and attention.

Whatever value our relationships accrue in our lives is assigned to them when we decide how much time and attention they require or deserve. We simply devote more time and attention to relationships with those things and people that we deem more important to us for whatever reason. We enter into some relationships by choice; others are sometimes thrust upon us by a confluence of circumstance or the inevitable riptide of protracted neglect.

The amount of time and attention we devote to the relationships in our lives may change with circumstance, but our investments in time and attention always reveal current snapshots of our deepest values en route. Our investments in time and attention always expose the hierarchy of our priorities to the bone.

What was important to us yesterday may be less so today, and today’s afterthought may be tomorrow’s headline, but you can pretty much rest assured that your current values are a reflection of how and where you invest your time and attention, and vice versa: how and where you invest your time and attention will reflect your values.

Therefore…