TRUE FRIENDSHIP



I am often fascinated by the many dynamic ways friendship can form, develop and change.  Take for example those friends you don't see as often as you would like but you feel are really important to you.  There are some friendships that can be picked up as soon as you meet once more, chatting as if no time has passed at all.

Others, take time to re-adjust.  Some are awkward but in the case of people we genuinely like this is overcome.  Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not.

My Father recently went to a school re-union where he met people he had not seen for 40 years and after the initial re-aquaintence conversations everything was easy.

Friendships, to my mind move in tides.  I will spend weeks regularly meeting group x, before, for no reason I can distinguish move to group y and see little of x until that tide comes back.  I see little conscious reason for this yet it happens.

I have, over the years drifted for no reason I saw at the time from close friendship group into other close friendship groups.

Take for example my transition from a friendship group within my Form group at Secondary school, into a close friendship group with another group.  I went from spending my lunch break in my form room, to spending it in another form room.  I did not lose friendships along the way, but the focus shifted.

Now, as an adult we have groups whom we consider ourselves members.  I once heard this described at a friend's funeral as the 'Spheres of being'.  These spheres sometimes meet but often they do not, only the most priviledged members of our monkey-sphere (the 100 or so people one can actively maintain friendships with at any one time - allegedly) can move between these spheres.

Personally, I have always considered that the most priviledged of these should be one's partner.  I hold it in high regard to show someone I love every aspect of my world and in turn I would like to see more of their world.  But then there are the magical times when friends you suspected would get on, meet and hit it off as if they were old friends.  This happened to me at a party of mine about 5 years ago.

This brief pause has little to no reason for it either, merely the jotting down of some ideas for the sake of it.