A friendly consideration…

Posted on July 11, 2016

Since this is a blog about relationships, I thought I’d talk a little bit about friendship. Friendship, I think, is the foundation of any solid relationship. Whether that friendship turns into a romance or if it remains platonic, it requires attention. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the friendships in my life. Admittedly, I realized that there are a few very important relationships I have been unintentionally ignoring; but there are also others that I think I’ve been maybe nurturing too much.

To the dear friends who I’ve left feeling ignored, I apologize. Chances are good that if you haven’t noticed my lack of contact, you’re not one of the people for whom that apology was intended. But if you read that first sentence and thought, “Yeah. I haven’t heard from her in a while and I wonder why,” or if you’ve been feeling like I’m distant (maybe that distance has even annoyed you)? Yep. That was for you. There are a handful of you that I could absolutely do a better job of keeping in touch with. I’m sorry. I will try harder. And I mean that sincerely.

Conversely, there are a handful of people who get entirely too much of my energy. I think about those people, I make time for those people, I reach out to those people to see how they are. Some of them deserve that attention; some do not.

In a meditation class I recently took, we spent a lot of time on living in the moment. The goal was to learn how to focus energy on the present, to let go of the energy of other people, and to become more self-aware. Through a series of exercises, I was asked to visualize things outside the present, to release the energy associated with them, and to picture blowing them up. And when I say “blowing them up,” I literally mean visualizing them in the distance and then blowing them up – with TNT, with a shotgun, as fireworks. We were told to use whatever worked for us to make those visualizations completely disappear. I think the whole point was to help us release any energy we were carrying from those people and experiences and to learn to live more fully in the present, but for me that exercise of blowing things up was very stressful. I never really mastered it.

As I think now about letting something go, I realize that we rarely do that with people and relationships in an active way. Instead, we begin to ignore someone or we change the parameters of the relationship in such a way that it simply begins to fade. And, as it is slowly and passively dying, we make excuses for why that’s happening: I’m busy, he moved, we had an argument, I work so much, etc., etc. etc. Often, this process of delay and excuses causes us a lot of undue stress and guilt.

Are there relationships in your life that are dying a slow death? If you can identify one or some, I think the most important question you can ask yourself is whether or not the loss of that relationship truly matters to you. If that person with whom you were once close disappeared completely from your life, would it make you sad? And, if you knew there was something you could do to hold onto that relationship, would you? If the answer to those questions was “yes,” I think you know what you need to do.

But if you answered “no” to those questions, I pose another: Why are you holding onto something that means so little to you? Is obligation or guilt the reason? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t someone to be my friend for those reasons. And you probably don’t either.

Today’s social media world has transformed the word “friend” into a verb. You can now “friend” someone and instantly access their life, their families, their everyday. In that way, the word “friend” has lost so much of its meaning and significance. And then we are left dumbfounded to understand why people feel lonely. The truth is that there is a significant difference between being a friend and being an acquaintance.

I guess my point is this: It is important to decide what role people really play in our lives so that we can spend our energy wisely. Investing too much energy in someone who is not really a friend is like waiting for a ship at the airport.