“A good friend is a connection to life – a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.” – Lois Wyse  

Without my friends, who would I be? A lesser woman, for sure, a lonelier one also. Good friends, people with whom you share book recommendations, and laughs and fears, and moments big and small – memories – are gold. The ones who stay around, accepting who you are, that is. The ones you keep around.

Like family, friendships can be complicated and fraught. We change, we move away, we marry someone who decides, nah, I don’t like this or that friend. We choose. We prioritize and reprioritize. We cull the herd. We change the narrative to suit our choices. We meet new people and the lights come on once more; the herd is expanded. There is joy in Mudville.

Still, losing friends however it happens can sting. No one, not one person, said adulting was easy.

I prefer a very small herd, one that expands naturally, as the children and the children’s spouses become close friends too. A true delight.

“There is nothing better in the world than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.” – Linda Grayson

Friends with whom one can appreciate the same things – like chocolate (dark, please), and especially laugh at the same things, are vitally important. We are all made of crooked timber, said Alexander McCall Smith, and ain’t that the truth (he was paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, by the way); acceptance in friendships is also key. Building relationships over time take patience, generosity, kindness, authenticity, diplomacy, and consistency. The friends who show up time and again to laugh or cry are the best of them.

“Awards become corroded. Friends gather no dust.” —Jesse Owens.

Cicero, in his essay Laelius de Amicitia argues many points with regard to what makes for good friendships; one point he makes is that good friends are those who are not only helpful and sympathetic in times of trouble, but also and essentially joyous at times of success, as that is where the rubber of true friendship meets the road.

Celebrating someone else’s triumphs reveals more, is a more challenging test of friendship, he is saying, than being kind during the dark nights we all experience. I had a friend who revealed after almost a decade of close ties that she was unable to be anything other than threatened and jealous – poisonously so – when I was doing well. It shocked and saddened me; our bond did not survive. It could not. A lack of generosity – the best souls are generous ones – is a deal breaker.

“Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families” – Tennessee Williams

Some people travel and vacate with their siblings. Huh?! Some people spend every day working with, dining with, hanging with – you name it – their siblings and/or parental units. No thank you. Fond as I am of my siblings (not that fond, TBH, though I love and wish them well) I much prefer the friends I have made along the way. My path has, frankly, been unconventional; around family I find I am required to fit into a box not of my choosing. This bad fit, which I have refused to accommodate for years now, has led to necessary clashes. Why would I, why would anyone, want that?

Drama Shield, Activate!!

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel” – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

There are friends who were acquaintances in other years, other lifetimes, who become golden friends to laugh with later on in life. We have so much in common; we have many differences. Still, we make it work, yet it doesn’t feel like work, because there is ease, there are shared values, there is a thread that has been unbroken all these years because life just works that way. Sometimes.

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.” —Virginia Woolf