Friendship

Friendship is a funny thing. You make friends based on your current lifestyle and they seem easy to maintain. In college (if you went to a super small school like me:) everyone lived within a 5 block radius so visiting and finding time together is never an issue. The problem is each of you have your own pathway to follow in life. Maintaining friendships across those pathways becomes much more difficult. Dreams change, some paths get closer while others spread further apart. The amount of work required, the divergence of paths and finding time to dedicate to friends is suddenly not as easy as it was in the past.

Keeping up with friends from high school or college changes as your lives change. What you had in common is now the past. Remaining current in their lives requires more information because it no longer coincides quite as much with your life. While this means many more stories (Story time!!!), it also means more time, new people to remember and relationships to keep straight. Within the blink of an eye you find yourself on a whole different path than your friends. The goals you shared have all been accomplished. The new goals set are no longer similar. With changing goals comes lifestyle changes. It is pretty easy to find yourself and your friends in whole new places in your lives that may or may not correlate. Suddenly you find yourself struggling to relate to each others lives.

Relating to new places in your friends life requires time. However, we all are trying to figure out our place in the world and discovering that place requires a lot of time and dedication. Finding time to catch up with old friends can become more difficult. Plus coordinating schedules is a lot harder with the individual commitments, distance, and time changes.

All these factors mean that friendship is suddenly a lot more work than it had been previously. So what do you do? Do you let friendships go? Do you continue to work hard to maintain them?

There are times when you are having a rough week and haven't had time to tell any of your friends about the stresses of that particular week. It's that card that comes in the mail to tell you that someone thinks you are great, that they realize how hard school is and want to congratulate you on being half way done. It is that card that really makes you smile and reminds you why maintaining friendships is so important.

So pretty much this was a really long way to say thanks for the card-it made me smile, it made my week better and made me think about all the friendships I have that are worth the work to maintain.