Friendship

Were you popular in high school? I wasn't. Not even a little bit. I knew everyone, including the popular kids, and I was friendly with everyone, but I wasn't in the "in" crowd.

I did have some very good, close friends that I spent most of my time with. We'd shop, got to movies, hang out. I always had people to spend my time with. The thing that I know about me though, is that those people change periodically. I'm still facebook friends with my closest friends from high school, but that's it really.

The reason I bring this up is that I was talking with a friend yesterday and he was sharing that a lot of relationships seem to be falling out of his life. And this concerned him. I thought to myself, he's more like my sisters - who still talk with their best friends from 4th grade, on a fairly regular basis.

For whatever reason, this hasn't been the types of relationships I've built. I will say however, that in the last 5-6 years I've built more lasting relationships than ever before in my life. And maybe part of that is that I finally have a better sense of who I am.

I think that's part of what occurs in marriages where the couple divorces. As life moves forward, people change in different ways, and if they are changing in ways that push them away from each other, it's difficult, if not impossible for the relationship to survive. And that's what I feel happened all those years with my friendships. I was changing in different ways and the people in the relationships with me were changing in other ways, or not changing, so the relationship just fell to the wayside. After a time, I just realized that was how my life was and it was okay for me.

I want to share now that I love all my friends, old and new, talking to them and not talking to them. I just feel like things are so fluid in life and my job is to figure out how to go with the flow. And if the flow I'm in doesn't work for me, I get to find a different flow (sometimes that means different friends).