Okay…I have been told that I am not very good at delivering a conclusive goodbye.  Apparently, there are a series of goodbyes that precipitate my actual exit from any given conversation.  Goodbye to me I guess means that I am thinking about saying goodbye and intend to do so eventually.

I am not sure why I am this way…perhaps it has something subconsciously to do with not wanting to say goodbye in some situations even though one knows one must.  Perhaps it has something to do with the way my mind operates – it is constantly pinging from one topic to the next.  Or perhaps it is just a personality flaw to add to my ever-growing personality flaw list.

I would like to believe that my lack of concrete commitment to goodbyes is really a compliment – in that I would rather stay engaged with the person I am chatting with, but there are always those literalists who believe goodbye really means goodbye.  Those folks actually expect the conversation to end in short order when I say, "Well, I should probably say goodbye and let you get back to what you were doing."

I have reflected on this and I think I have the problem of dealing with goodbye literalists solved.  In the future I just won’t say goodbye (or anything else that signals the conversation is coming to an end) …I’ll just keep talking about whatever I am talking about until I am done with no warning whatsoever that I may possibly be done soon (who says I am not a stellar problem solver?).  I imagine that after being engaged in a few dozen long and rambling conversations with no goodbyes, the goodbye literalists will once again long for the old six goodbye cues to know the conversation is winding down in my mind.

I don’t think I am alone in my goodbye predicament.  I am reminded of the lyrics of the Beatles song Hello Goodbye that state, "You say goodbye and I say hello…hello…hello…I don’t know why you say goodbye I say hello."  Clearly in my case, my goodbyes are really a series of hellos.  Hey, if it is good enough for the Beatles, it is good enough for me.

Hello…  🙂

Day two hundred and ninety-five of the new forty

CC