Life, as Bob Cratchit said, is made up of meetings and partings. Over the course of it, you probably befriend and lose touch with several times the number of people you stay friends with. I have photographs going back almost three decades and I remember vividly everyone in them, but there's no more than a handful of people in the early shots that I am still in contact with.
Losing friends is easy to do. Over the past five months I have lost three friends who I thought were good, close, mates and I expected to have them for the rest of my life. One of them was entirely my own fault and I have only myself to blame. The second actually came about as a result of the first. We had an argument about what happend and are, I think, both too proud to make the first move towards a reconcilliation.
It is the third one which is a total puzzle. I have no idea what I may have said or done. All I know is that I went on holiday for a fortnight and when I came back they were gone. Moreover, they won't talk to me, so I don't know what I might have done wrong.
Balanced against this is the wonderful fact that no fewer than five friends I thought I had lost touch with have contacted me recently and I have met up with two of them for the first time in years; the other three now live abroad, which might explain why we lost touch in the first place. Hearing from them actually came as something of a shock to me. I'm not the sort of person that I would expect someone would want to track down, at least not for any pleasant reason. Just getting an email from each of these people was enough to make me feel good for the rest of the day.
Even as I have been drafting this (you might have noticed that each entry takes a while for me to finish) something else wonderful has happened. The second person I was referring to above contacted me. It was strange, because they sent me a message to say that they were near my office, which I received shortly after I walked past their office. It's early days yet, but let us hope that we can rebuild that friendship.
Making friends is hard. Keeping them is harder. Losing them is the easiest thing in the world. It's a very hard line to tread without making mistakes.
Losing friends is easy to do. Over the past five months I have lost three friends who I thought were good, close, mates and I expected to have them for the rest of my life. One of them was entirely my own fault and I have only myself to blame. The second actually came about as a result of the first. We had an argument about what happend and are, I think, both too proud to make the first move towards a reconcilliation.
It is the third one which is a total puzzle. I have no idea what I may have said or done. All I know is that I went on holiday for a fortnight and when I came back they were gone. Moreover, they won't talk to me, so I don't know what I might have done wrong.
Balanced against this is the wonderful fact that no fewer than five friends I thought I had lost touch with have contacted me recently and I have met up with two of them for the first time in years; the other three now live abroad, which might explain why we lost touch in the first place. Hearing from them actually came as something of a shock to me. I'm not the sort of person that I would expect someone would want to track down, at least not for any pleasant reason. Just getting an email from each of these people was enough to make me feel good for the rest of the day.
Even as I have been drafting this (you might have noticed that each entry takes a while for me to finish) something else wonderful has happened. The second person I was referring to above contacted me. It was strange, because they sent me a message to say that they were near my office, which I received shortly after I walked past their office. It's early days yet, but let us hope that we can rebuild that friendship.
Making friends is hard. Keeping them is harder. Losing them is the easiest thing in the world. It's a very hard line to tread without making mistakes.
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