A friend of mine sent me a message, “Dinner tonight?”
“Yes,” I typed back.
“See you in half an hour,” she replied.
I knew I should have said no. And if she had insisted, I should have made up an excuse. I had scheduled a writing day and hadn’t written a word so far. I had no business going out to dinner.
But, it had been a while since she initiated an outing with me. And I valued her company. Four hours later, I was thankful that I made the time to see her. We spent dinner catching up on our lives. I have been seeing her around in groups but I believe a one-on-one outing is vital to maintaining most friendships. It allows you to have personal conversations that you may not be able to in other settings, and opens the groundwork for deeper interactions.
One thing she asked me during the dinner was, “Who are your friends?”
On a superfluos level, she knew who my friends are. She wanted to know who I counted as my true blue friends, those who would be there no matter what.
The question gave me the opportunity to examine the current friendships in my life. I am thankful that I have a vivacious and ever-changing social circle. I enjoy meeting new people and feel revitalized interacting with interesting people with fantastic life experiences. But the downfall of living that lifestyle is that many of my friendships are transient. They exist for the here and now and are not necessarily available in the future.
I try to remain cordial with people because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my coincedence-ridden life is that everyone is connected. I have met people across the world who wind up being best friends or related to people I know. It’s a small world after all is not just some chorus line in a song, it’s the reality of my life.
Despite my attempts at remaining cordial, sometimes I can’t help it, I meet some people and I just have to be a jerk. Something primal within me responds to their attitude and behavior and I turn into a different person. I trust my gut instinct when it tells me to do that. Given enough time, I usually find out what it was that my subconscious knew instantaneously.
I can count on one hand the true friends I have. I explained to my friend exactly what made me thankful to have them in my life. The others are interwoven within different friendship layers. I’ve got the social friends, the high school friends, the college friends, the work friends, etc. Each of them represent a different timeframe of my life and may see different facets of my personality.
For whatever reason, whenever anyone asks this question (“Who are your friends?”) it sets off the desire to go and meet new people. Luckily (unluckily?) for me, I’ve got several events in the future that will give me the opportunity to do just that (and take time away from writing).
