Jordan's Blog - Slipping

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Zach 2017-05-16

This is a post about friendship. It’s weird that people can spend years getting to know, like, maybe even love someone, only for a friendship to just slip by the wayside. Say you went through high school and undergrad with someone – that’s 8 years, over a third of your entire life at that point, that you have spent developing your friendship in, relatively, the same location. You might see them every once in a while, reconnect, and immensely enjoy your time together; but that feeling fades within a week. It’s nobody’s fault, but it sucks.

As children, we both acquire and keep friends through convenience. We bond with other kids that lived in the neighborhood or went to the same school as us. Even in college, there are the people who are roommates, live across the hall, or are in your classes. Once we leave school, though, and enter the adult world, it’s a bit different. Not only do you build friendships with people who aren’t necessarily right next to you, you have your previous friendships tested by distance and time. It is at this point where people are forced to make decisions; work to keep and enhance these friendships or let them fade. Let them slip.

Lilian Whiting wrote that, “To be rich in friends is to be poor in nothing.” When I was younger, I thought it meant that a person should surround themselves with people who they like. When I was younger, I was wrong. Friendships vary in value; not in what you gain from them or how many you have, but in who they are with. Minus my parents and sister, there are four people in my life that I trust wholeheartedly. These are people who I have known for varying amounts of time and in different circumstances, but they have all made an impact on me in ways they will never know. I do not mean to rag on people who have a lot of friends or “friends”, that’s a great thing. Surrounding yourself with people that you enjoy is an amazing thing, but it is important to understand what you have when you have it.

I guess we’ve gotten to the spot in this post where I’m supposed to sum it all up and tell you why I wrote this post. I guess it’s just that this is the time of year where people move out, move away, move on. Tell people what they mean to you; don’t leave it for later. I write this as someone who has lost best friends in the past. You don’t even realize that it’s happening until it already has. Once you realize it, though, you feel like a piece of you has died. Your heart aches. You are never the same person again.