Friends In October
“Have you written anything on your blog lately?” I’ve gotten that question a lot. It’s a nice feeling to know one is read even if only a blog. I’m aware, if not smart enough to know posting a rant on a blog accomplishes very little except for maybe painting oneself as a nut. I don’t know that my recent thoughts are worthy of the label “rant”, -“sallow” maybe, but such as they are, they are not entirely positive. Call it a period of flux or transition, but a good number of folks in various channels of life have moved on and I miss their influence even if only it was a dependable smile enjoyed throughout the busyness of the day. Like a tile artwork that has lost some of its pieces, with each departure the image I knew as my pleasant little corner of the world begins to appear less and less like the original beauty. In my case I try to fill in the blanks with more laughter perhaps hoping to glue the remaining pieces in place. Perhaps it is not the best approach.
I am a generation behind the folks who must be losing friends in droves to the ultimate finality of death. My losses are nothing like that. I’ve read or heard that by the time one reaches the age of eighty that half of the people one is born with are gone. This period, to some extent, foreshadows what that experience might possibly be like because it seems roughly half of my social world has similarly “moved on”. They’re not GONE in the sense that I can’t hope for a future connection, but it can’t be achieved, for now, without some effort on both sides. Even with the onslaught of social media and IM apps meant to make this sort of thing a breeze, I get how with more to manage the world has become more unmanageable. Cursory efforts to maintain a connection get lost in all the other noise that, for reasons of personal wellbeing and sanity, might be wise to ignore. I get it, and I am guilty of it too.
Among my departed are several classes. There are those who may have read this far and cry ‘hypocrite’. They are those who reach out and match or beat my efforts. My advice to myself, in most cases, is to get back to those folks for they have made the time.
There are those in another class who don’t seem to know how to move on without wrapping it in some kind of drama or resentment. I understand those people better than most as I suppose this is a coping mechanism they learned at a very young age. To them it might not feel right or normal without the drama. -But! For them,…maybe some alone time is warranted.
There are those for whom it quickly became obvious that I cherished them far more than they me. There is no shame in admitting that. For these people, were I looking for advice, there seems no shortage of canned responses available to plagiarize, predominantly from Facebook friends, in the form of memes. In these are summations like ‘They don’t deserve you’ and ‘Haters gotta hate’. My word! I wonder what cruelty do people inflict on one another that the door must be slammed shut when it costs nothing to leave it open. -But to be fair, here too I get where they are coming from. It “feels” like rejection and the instinctual response is to reject back thereby blurring the historical record of who rejected who first.
The vast majority I am sure fall into a very big class of people whom I am sure are just trying to make their way in the world just as I am. I once knew someone who wisely described his life as a three-legged stool. One leg was his family. Another was work, and the last was his sprirtual life. Seldom, he said, did the stool sit at a level. Tending to one often led to the shortening of another, and anyone reading this can probably think of at least one person for whom the stool is presently uninhabitable. Turn the stool over and toss in the effects of our ever growing digital world, and you are now spinning plates on each of the legs. If time with me doesn’t take someone closer to the objective of a flat-bottomed seat then, by all means, it makes little sense to carve out a space for me.
The thing is…for me…most people help flatten my stool in one way or another. From most there is something to learn. The younger, single crowd teach me self care I did not know at their age. It is easy for my generation to write them off as bouncing from one stimulus to another, but I see it differently in the young people I know. They are much better in the moment than I was and sometimes am. My married contemporaries remind me of the self-sacrifice and diligence required to have that life. When my stool is shaky, it sometimes helps to hear, “Yeah, Matt, sometimes mine is too, and I don’t know what to do.” My single contemporaries, most of them anyway, are among the most self-aware. They’ve lived a little and spend the most time with themselves and who better to articulate dreams, passion, and even regret which when properly channeled needn’t necessarily be a source of guilt or shame. Anyway, my world has shrunk, and I’ve noticed.
As a closing thought, I’ll recommend G.K. Chesterton’s poem IN OCTOBER as it is October at the time of this writing. -Now! If someone were recommending a poem to me, my response would likely be, “Get out of here, I’m not reading some poem, you flake!” That’s fair, and fairer still is that Chesterton, while brilliant, is also a little hard. I’m swapping out his love for a bygone age for my lost connections, but I make it work in my head. I’m just thinking maybe a little more poetry and a little less door slamming will give those smiles a chance to come back.
“Where are they gone that did delight in honour
Abrupt and absolute as an epic ends,
What light of the Last Things, like death at morning,
Crowns the true lovers and the tragic friends?” …