Hoops of steel

I have been thinking a bit about friendships the last couple of weeks. I'm about to leave my job and it's a funny time. I keep looking at the people who I sit and work with day in day out and imagining what it will be like when I'm not doing that any more. You spend so much time with the people you work with. You form private jokes, a "technical" language and dialect relating to your work that only the small group of you understand. You have lunch together. You sit in small rooms staring at whiteboards or computer screens trying to get the answers right. You bitch about the bosses and moan about the pay together. A few of these people, I am sincerely hoping, will become my friends once I've moved on. But experience tells you that most of them won't. That's just how it goes.

In fact, friends are rare. Of course they are. We're all so different, and most of us have traits and quirks that would drive the majority of people a bit mad. Only a few people out there have the same chemistry, complimentary eccentricities. Friendships, to be sure, are to be cherished and treasured because sometimes it feels like it would be easy to go your whole life without really connecting. Especially in our culture, in this time, when we have been conditioned into believing that money and our ability to earn it should be the defining priority of our lives.

So it has been my pleasure to feel that some of my longest-lasting and most treasured friendships have been given a bit of an MOT one way or another in the last couple of months and have come through with shining colours. A week in France with "the inner sanctum" proved to be a profound and warm gathering of old friends. A "witches of Eastwick" weekend just a fortnight ago rekindled a friendship that, if I'm honest, has been in danger of flickering out over the last year or so. A visit from Ms P from Thaliand, just for a day, did more than enough to make me feel that we still have a lot to talk and laugh about in the years to come.

There's something about that easy company of people who just know you. You can relax, breathe, and be yourself without having to feel like you need to explain or justify. Of course, just knowing someone for a long time isn't enough to keep a friendship alive. Neither is just happening to be in the same place as them every day. As Ms P said to me, you have to keep giving the friendship the chance to form new, shared experiences and memories. There's no point spending your whole time looking back and reminiscing - that just puts your friendship in a museum. And what living thing can survive in a sealed glass case? And more than this, the experiences have to  generate shared emotions, a sense of real empathy and connectedness. Of "frequency", as Mr H would put it. I feel it when we sit down to play bridge with D&P. I feel it on a camping weekend with "the gang". I felt it intensely sitting in the back yard of Ms Loy in her lovely home in France just laughing and being with her and M.

When I think about the casual way I have treated friendships as a younger woman it shocks me. You take so much for granted in your early life, when everything is plentiful and you can pretty much get another one of anything you lose or drop or forget to pick up. Now, I feel so lucky to have such friendships in my life. And I really do hope that the last three and half years has added a couple more.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.
(Hamlet 1.3.62-3)

IMAGE: CC license from Roads Less Travelled Photography http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattsh/5835961424/