Friendships are a quirky thing.
We have all kinds of friends throughout our lives. We have acquaintances, long-time friends, friends of your spouses, college friends, work friends, hobby friends, and childhood friends.

And many, if not most of these, don’t really last.
They last as long as they need to; they last as long as they are supposed to in our lives.
Although sometimes we are resistant in letting them go nearly all of them have a shelf-life.

Last week a childhood friend of mine lost his Dad. I don’t think I had seen him in nearly 20 years. It’s funny really since there was a time in my life that I probably saw him nearly every day for years.
We went to school together and even lived a few houses from each other.

If you’re like me, you go home with a little trepidation. I don’t mean home to my parents’ house but in the sense of home as in your community. You always wonder: will you seem like the same person, will they think you’ve changed — or not? And either way, will it somehow be a bad thing?
Maybe that’s what small towns do to us, they make us ponder belonging way more than large cities possibly do.

I went home, as it were, to pay my respects to the family who had lost its patriarch.
I saw faces I had long forgotten. I chatted with people who knew me when, as they say.

These are the foundational friendships probably most of us have. People you haven’t seen for a couple of decades and probably won’t for one or two more.

You talk about what was and what you’ve been doing — and that’s it.

You realize these people are portals to your past, to some good and hard times. They are the co-keepers of your history. There’s value in that. It reminds you of where you’ve been, who you’ve been in your life at times. Equally these connections show you just how much you’ve grown and evolved over the years– either in spite of, or because of, these people.

Life is all about relationships and connections.
We go through phases, some return time and again and others were only ever meant to be visited once.

I have been doing a lot of inner work in the last two years and this was an interesting process for me… to go home and see just how much I have changed. I visited some of my past with fondness and returned to my present with appreciation for the journey, for all the versions of myself I have been over the years that brought me to this place of becoming.
I am learning to like all those versions and love who I am, and the choices that I have made, that brought me to the present.

Our friendships in life are living snapshots of different parts of our lives.

Friendships are a quirky thing — some last and some don’t. But they all have mattered.

Sunshine & Sarcasm,
Lowi & G