Having broken my silence yesterday I am challenging myself to write here more often, even if it is just a few words. Today I am returning to a subject that I addressed in my only other previous post this year – friends. However I am coming at it from a slightly difference direction, one that has been occupying my mind recently.
It doesn’t take long thumbing through the entries here that are in the friends tag to discover that I view friendships as exceedingly important in our lives. Perhaps it would be better to describe them as connections as this post is going to delve a bit into how people go in and out of the category of “my friends”.
First of all I do believe that just about everything we are in life is shaped by the people that we ‘contact’ – and I am using contact in a very broad sense here – for instance, reading the book “Sophie’s World” brings you into contact with Jostein Gaarder, the author ( I have chosen that example only because it was the first book I saw when I looked up from my keyboard – not because there is any particular significance in this story😄). When you listen to the music from Swan Lake you come into contact with Tchaikovsky. Those are equally part of our shaping as the schoolmates we come in contact with or the people in the running club.
One way or another these contacts – connections – are (or can be) influential in your life. I think back here to those I was at school with, to those I played with in various musical ensembles, to the teachers and professors who taught me, to my family members and to many more categories of people that I have encountered through my life.
The vast majority of these are fleeting connections – for instance, of the fifty or so that I travelled with for 10 days around France in the Wessex Youth Orchestra only one remains in contact and even that is not a very regular contact. I could state a whole host of similar examples. Whether or not the contact remains does not, however, necessarily reflect the importance of the connection (those familiar with my blog will recognise a few echoes of the red thread coming through here). My last teacher at primary school had a big effect on my life – but I hardly had any contact with him after those couple of years ended.
Others had just a small effect, but they have persisted much more – often because they belong to the same ‘community’ as me – so those in the Salvation Army Band, or the running club, or work colleagues.
Having said all that I will get to what I was thinking about to start this post. There is a lot of opinion out there about the merits (or otherwise) of social media – is it a good thing or not – as the bard once said the answer here is likely to be “mibbees aye, mibbees naw”😂 – and as is so often the case a good response might be “it depends”. One area where it doesn’t reflect ‘real life’ too well is in the area of friends, or connections, or whatever they are called in your favourite social media. Once ‘friended’ it is exceedingly unlikely that you will ever become ‘unfriended’ – happens sometimes, but in my experience not often.
Thus people have thousands of ‘friends’ – when the reality is that most of those – like my primary teacher – have really left the circle a long time ago. I wonder if there could be something developed which allowed your friendship to in some way decay if it wasn’t properly attended to. Now – its not for me to say what the right algorithm would for such a thing, but certainly it should be possible to achieve.
I think now of my “70 for 70” exercise last year. Having just one conversation with those seventy extra people turned out to take more effort than I expected – now what about the others (approx 400-500 I guess) who are friends on Facebook or connected on LinkedIn or whatever. The reality is that I am not sure I have the time to properly attend to those connections – yes I can “broadcast” something that they will all see and gain a little insight into my life – but is that necessary?
As with many of my posts – I am not here positing a solution. Rather just putting some thoughts out there to see where they lead.
To answer the question in the title, I think that most friendships are ephemeral – or at least time limited. So many times I hear “when I contacted my old friend it was like we had never been apart” – which is true, in some senses, but it doesn’t change the fact that the friendship had become – at best – dormant until it was stirred into action again – and – probably would once again fade soon after that renewed encounter. That doesn’t diminish the power of these friendships, or the importance of them in our lives – it just changes the way we view them. They come – they go – sometimes they come again.
Each time they are cherished, each time they add a little to our life experience – without them we would be pretty much worthless.