On Old Friends – A Review

I recently spent the weekend with some friends from High School… you know? Putting that qualifier there doesn’t make sense.

I recently spent the weekend with some friends. I only talk to one of them semi-regularly, so they might be shocked to know that I’d go to bat for any of them. They’re all important to me in some way or another, and I really appreciate the roles they filled in my life, no matter how large or how small. How new or how old.

I came to the revelation that I’d been friends with most of them for 8 years as of this month. And even realized that I’d at least known two of them for twelve years. This might not seem like a long time, or it might seem excruciatingly long, but either way that’s kind of the way life works.

We talked a lot about people, and how they changed or haven’t changed. We talked about bunnies, and tortoises, and Animal Crossing. We talked about the smell of cheerios, when peanut butter expires, and the benefits of jumping rope. And I was immediately taken back to when we were younger and had similarly strange conversations. The only difference was we were adults now. Everyone there had pursued or is pursuing higher education. All of them have or had jobs. They’ve had relationships with people I never met, they lost loved ones, and had traveled across the globe.

Whether it was the general buzz in the air, or the general buzz on everyone’s brain, I felt strangely at peace. Those of you who personally know me outside of this blog know that (if all goes well) I’m moving to New York in two months. Because of this and some personal stuff, I’ve been feeling this immense pressure inside of me that I’m going to lose all of this. But there, in that moment. After hardly seeing each other without cause for five years, I realized that this kind of stuff never goes away.

You don’t lose friendships, but you can lose friends. You don’t lose silly life lessons, tips or tricks, or memories, you just can lose contact. And that’s fine. The nature of the universe is dispersion. We’re all bundles of atoms coming to terms with being adrift, moving towards entropy. We’re spreading out, across the country, and across our disciplines, and our thoughts and what we know. We’re growing up, and we’re growing out.

But I’ve always been obsessed with growing in. Funnily enough, it’s the people who have been around for nearly the longest who taught me that that’s not how I need to be anymore. Ironically, I’m so focused on learning lessons from my life, that the latest lesson I learned is to stop looking for them the way that I am, because there’s some right in front of me.

This last weekend was just a fluke. It was a random text that led to a random adventure, if you can call it that. But it’s one that really put things into perspective for me.

I have two more months in California, and I’m not afraid of crashing and burning and having to come back. But I’m also not afraid of taking these two months to learn what I should’ve learned sometime else during these past eight years.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!