Friendship

I've had a fun and crazy week.  A culminating moment of my job is starting this week (the Princess Festival starts Wednesday), and although I've been working an obscene number of hours, I've also had to opportunity to reconnect with old friends, and spend time with close, consistent friends.  It has been so great that several of my closest friends have spent time this week helping me with my last minute tasks at work.  I'm really blessed.

It has me thinking, though, about the nature of friendship.

I have another friend, who's been struggling because I've insisted that we take a break from being hang-out buddies.  Six months ago I told her that I needed space from the friendship, and she's unhappy about it.  At one point I told her "I love my friendships that wax and wane - I love it when they organically shift in intensity, and have no intention of forcing any relationship to be full-time, part-time, or over."  Right now, I just don't want to hang out - that could change in six months, or six years, or never.  I can't say, but that's how I like it.

In my opinion, real friendship is when people spend time together when their interests or attitudes harmonize, and since every person is perpetually evolving, when people's lives lose harmony, they spend time apart.  If a relationship can't survive that, it doesn't seem like real friendship to me, but seems to be something more like co-dependency.  It goes back, I suppose, to the adage that if you love something, let it go: if it comes back, it's yours - and if it doesn't, it never was yours.

And so, in short, this is a love note to my friends - those whom I haven't seen or talked to in years, those that I see on a daily basis, and all of those in-between.  It's been a fun week to reconnect with B-rad, Dave, Jenny, Cathie, Matt, Jon, Genevieve, Leslie, Chris and Michael.  It's been nice to have dRM and Mandy around, helping out and hanging out.  It's been a good week to know that even though I haven't spent time with or really talked to Sunny, Katie, Derrek or Xrad, (or many, many others - Anne just came to mind) we're cool.

I told you I was blessed!