Some people make friends easily and have lots and lots of friends. They could probably spend every day with a different friend and not have to start recycling people for months. I’m not one of those people.
I clearly missed the bit of female socialization that is supposed to make me good at talking about my feelings. I’m know I don’t do a very good job of keeping in touch with my friends, or letting them know how important they are to me.
I’ve always been a bit casual about friendships. People come into my life and then drift out again, and I usually let that happen, without making much of an effort to keep in touch. Nearly two years ago one of my closest friends died after a long battle with breast cancer. Losing her is obviously irreversible, but has made me realise that the loss of my other friendships is not. It’s such a waste to let a friendship die needlessly.
Democritus said "Life is not worth living for the man who has not even one good friend."
I’d turn that around and say that if a person has even one good, true friendship, theirs must be a good life.
I am lucky enough to have several such good friends in my life. Even though I don’t know how to find the words to say so, I truly do appreciate these friendships. To have such good friends, I know I must really have done something right with my life.
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. -Artistotle
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival. -C. S. Lewis
I am extremely lucky to have (and to have had) such good friends in my life.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
As someone who hasn’t always invested the energy that I should into my friendships I’ll have to agree that friends are worth their weight in gold.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Signing up to the badly-managed friendship club. To my friends I always say I am there for them, but lately I come to realise that is not enough, if you just stand there then you never gonna be part of anything.
It’s hard for me, friendship has no set milestones, no project managers, no timesheet to log hours, no weekly meetings to do demo. No one is keeping track of the bug list, no plan on doing load testing. If this is a development project we would have failed 100% everytime. So it’s really a mystery to me how some of them are still operational. And I often think it’s only a matter of time before they cut the funding.
August 13th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I do agree that friendship is very important. I kind of misses out on the girlie stuff as well, as all of my very close gfs from high school aren’t in Nz anymore.
We do have a discussion forum where we subscribe to by email and we keep each other updated that way. But, it’s kind of not quite the same when you can’t hang out with them every now and then.
I do try to make an effort to visit friends here but it is not going that well after we had Emma.
And for Doug, you can make yourself a task list and keep track of who you should visit each week/month etc?
So it is do-able! 