You Gotta Have Friends

Last week I met with two friends that I have known for years. The first I have known since the first month that I moved to London in 1993, the other for almost ten years. To add to that my friend Michele was visiting from the States over Christmas. Michele and I figure that we have known each other now for almost 20 years, and 15 years of that have been with our living thousands of miles apart. With all this, it is no surprise I have been thinking about friendships, particularly how I am beginning more and more to prefer the company of old friends, than the work and effort which developing new friendships entails. There was a time when forming new friendships held a great excitement for, but that feeling has considerably waned.  It is now so pleasantly comfortable to be with people who have known me and whom I have known for a long time. With them there is no need to re-tell my life story, or explain the various roads (and cul-de-sacs) I have walked.

No one's life is a straight line; and the older we get the more paths and detours we have taken. What is wonderful about old friends is that they have been there walking alongside most of them and so their knowledge of them is first-hand.  They do not need to have related the narrative which develops out of interpreted retrospection. For the most part they were eye-witnesses. Years of knowing one another has given us 'long-distance' vision.  We know the real difficulties which life has thrown into the way of our of individual lives, and hopefully can be more forgiving of each other's foibles, and idiosyncrasies - the  particular ways in which the vicissitudes of life have shaped us and damaged us.  Long-distance vision also gives the authority to point out how the other has changed — for good or for ill; and because there is love, to do so in with kindness and charity.

So, to you who are my long-term friends - you know who you are: 'Thanks'.  I am who I am because of you.  Contnue being loving, honest and compassionate - and saving me from telling over and over the complicated story of my life