Friends and Relations

                One of the blogs I read this past week was about friendship, well not really about friendship. It was more about someone trying to understand friendship and it got me thinking about relationships. This particular blog hints at three types of friends, and they are, reason, season and life. I don’t think I can address all three in one blog, simply because I have a lot of thoughts about each one of these classifications to go into here.

                You see, I don’t really classify my friends in the manner I read about. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the point the writer was trying to make, it is just that I don’t have the same view. You see, and for those of you using google plus will understand this, I’ve always looked at my friends by how much I could tell them about myself without them freaking out and running off to live in seclusion or to the nearest sanitarium to get someone to commit me for the rest of my life. In other words… circles.

                That is how I keep track of how close a person is in their relationship with me. And the smaller the circle, the more you know about me or the more I will reveal about myself to you. It’s just the way I work. Now, are all my circles/friends in the same category? Nope. My mental picture of how this whole thing works in my life looks more like a VENN diagram done by some sort of schizophrenic paranoid sociopath. But it works for me.

                Sure people can move in and out of my life through the difficulties of time, space and death, but do any of these factors detract from the relationship we built? Nope. It does not. You, my dear reader, should know this of me by now, just through the way I’ve written about some of my childhood friends, Navy buddies and even my current chums. None of those people mean any less to me now that I am older, as a matter of fact, I would go so far to say, they actually mean more to me today than when we were running headlong into our respective adventures. And just because we’ve lost touch with each other, moved away, had disagreements about things we don’t even remember does not mean that they are any less close to me now than when we said our last fare thee wells.

                I know this is not the case for everyone, it can’t be. We as humans are programmed to not always be nice to each other. We hurt people who are close to us, we betray them, we ignore them, and we treat them like three day old meatloaf and then wonder why we sit alone at night in an empty apartment drinking wine straight from the bottle. We hurt each other out of fear and ignorance and occasionally malicious intent.  It is the way of the world.

                But as time passes and our pain fades to a dull emotional scar whose origins have been lost in the ether of our memories we yearn for the companionship we once shared with those who have moved on in our lives. Our brains lie to our hearts and the soldiers of our IDs whitewash the past into a sparkling glorious fun filled time of frolicking and remembrance. I for one am glad of this.

                Once we reconnect and stories of our conquests and misadventures are re-hashed we end up growing even fonder of our past friends. Sure, we easily lie to each other, we are older, wiser, less likely to make the mistakes of our past simply because we are too tired and our bones creak and ache. But we know, deep down inside we know that we truly can’t remember the trespasses that separated our love for one another at an earlier time in our own histories. We try as hard as we can to be good people to each other and in some cases we succeed, in others we fail.

                In the end, we all have friends of varying levels, degrees or closeness. These friends are in the same situation as you and we are all trying to make meaningful connections while trying to move forward in a society that is moving forward at a pace no one can be expected to keep pace with. After a week, month, year or even decade we forget the pain others have caused us and weep at the loss of friend we once had. Our existence here on this mud ball is linear in nature but not all of us are on the same path so it is nearly an impossibility we will maintain the same set of friends throughout our lives. Besides if that were the case, our lives would most definitely be boring and unfulfilling. New people in our lives mean new experiences and new stories that flesh out the chapters of our individual lives. And I for one want an extremely large novel at the end of my existence.

                Have a great week!