I’ve had several conversations recently with different friends and family about how difficult it can be to both maintain and make new friendships as “adults.” I’m talking about maintaining friendships from childhood/college or making new friends in the post college time. People get married, some have kids. Between work and other family obligations, people get busy.
Someone did tweet into my Twitter timeline recently a pretty great piece of advice on one way to help stay connected to your friends in the face of all the everyday busyness of adult life:
Adult friendships are hard. Everyone is busy and life happens.
I’ve learned you gotta text people when you’re thinking of them. A simple “thinking of you, hope all is well” really goes a long way.
I have more to say about this subject, however my thoughts are kinda all over the place at the moment. I’m going to need some more time to make them a little more coherent (I’ve written and deleted 3 or 4 different paragraphs).
In the meantime, anyone who happens to make it this far, I hope all is well with you. If we haven’t talked/texted/tweeted recently, I’d love to touch base and hear what is going on in your life.
In another great post from Brain Pickings, Maria Popova muses about friendship and the commodification of the word friend:
I often puzzle over the nature, structure, and function of friendship in human life — a function I have found to be indispensable to my own spiritual survival and, I suspect, to that of most human beings. But during a recent interview on Think Again, I found myself concerned with the commodification of the word “friend” in our culture. We call “friends” peers we barely know beyond the shallow roots of the professional connection, we mistake mere mutual admiration for friendship, we name-drop as “friends” acquaintances associating with whom we feel reflects favorably on us in the eyes of others, thus rendering true friendship vacant of Emerson’s exacting definition. We have perpetrated a corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation, compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.
In countering this conflation, I was reminded of philosopher Amelie Rorty’s fantastic 1976 taxonomy of the levels of personhood and wondered what a similar taxonomy of interpersonhood might look like. I envisioned a conception of friendship as concentric circles of human connection, intimacy, and emotional truthfulness, each larger circle a necessary but insufficient condition for the smaller circle it embraces.“I live my life in widening circles,” Rilke wrote.
Read the whole post here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/08/16/friendship/
So its been almost 10 months since I moved back to Oregon from LA. A few weeks ago it had me thinking about the people I may never see again. I know part of this is just the natural course of life, that people move into and out of your life. But its still strange to me that there are people that I was pretty close to, that I may never see again because both they and I have moved away. But then, I suppose this happens even in Portland. The only difference being there is still a chance I might randomly run into them.
to my So Cal friends…if I don’t see you again…thank you for helping to make my time in LA enjoyable in each of your particular ways.
The hard part (at least for me)
about breaking up is losing the friendship. If even just temporarily. Setting arbitrary dates of when you can touch base again and see where we are in life. But the thing is, you won’t be in the same place. I suppose that’s a good thing in some ways, as there’s a reason things had to change. But there is still a feeling of deep loss. Like the act of actively not talking to someone will just make that the new status quo. At the end of the arbitrary time, there just won’t anything left but awkwardness and bittersweet memories.
Obviously this morning was seeped in melancholy for me, and listening to the John Prine version of the below song probably didn’t help. But it sums up a little of what I’m feeling this morning.
It always amazes him when others don’t (even though he’s seen it time and time again).
It just seems so simple (even when it isn’t).
And so his heart is torn…between passion, friendship and love.
He wished to know her better, and now he does. He wonders if perhaps the passion will be muted. He steps away, as he feels he must, hopeful, yet expecting nothing.
He gave himself to the moments, worrying not about the past or the future (at least not much). He is thankful for those moments, for they were wonderful.
My neighbor Elizabeth and her twin brother James are about to set off on a journey around the United States. They are doing this for a new website called Common Ties. The website launched at noon today with the beginnings of their travel blog. The site should evolve over the next few months as the site expands with their travels.
On Saturday they will depart in a biodiesel powered Jeep Liberty for the first leg of the journey. This first leg will take them to unknown places in Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Washington. On the site you can send them emails and help direct the journey. It’s kinda like a traveling “This American Life.”
