Life This Week 16/4/2018: What Is Friendship?


My friendships, my friends and I have all evolved over time. 

I’ve been very fortunate to have both my old friends still very much present in my life as well as a host of newer friends I’ve made over the years.  I have social media and text messages to thank for the longevity and breadth of my social network.

Recently, the friendships I’ve been the most reflective about have been my longer term ones.  The people I grew up with, the ones who’ve seen me through major life events (both the good ones and the character building ones). 

I’m grateful that time and space have helped us reconnect and in a strange way now find ourselves in a deeper and more ‘honest’ (or should that be open) phase of friendship.  That the walls we built out of awkwardness and misinterpretation have now crumbled after difficult but necessary conversations have taken place.  I think I finally understand what ‘knowing who your real friends are’ means.

I’m grateful for those other older friends who’ve just been there and kept on keeping on with me.  That while we didn’t build walls between each other, distance and different life circumstances conspired to create them.  Yet our friendships continue with an easy mutual appreciation of each other as we take up wherever we last left off.

The friendships that surprise me are the ones I’ve made more recently now that I’m self proclaimed old and almost middle aged.  I’ve found myself strike up friendships with a more varied range of people than I ever did in my younger years (I feel so old writing this sentence….).  Perhaps getting older and a bit wiser enables you to make connections with a wider cross section of the world because of your own breadth of life experience.  The younger people in my life cause me to reflect positively on my own life at their age while the older people in my life inspire me to not fear ageing but to accept it for what it is.

What does friendship mean to you?  Have your thoughts changed as you’ve gotten older and gone through more of the trials and tribulations of life?


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *