If at any point you sit and assess where you are in life, either with regard how old you are or your location or what you're doing there, you can directly trace it to the people you have known throughout the time it took you to get there.
There are very obvious examples of this: the people you marry (the people you DON'T marry), your best friends, siblings... It's really easy to see how these people affect your life; sometimes quite drastically. But there are tons of not so obvious pushes and pulls on your life that really don't seem like much as individual events, but viewed together are much more significant. Anyhow, the thing that struck me the other day was not so much how others affect me, but how I affect others. How that it's possible, probable even, that for indefinite stretches of time, I exist solely for another person; that my presence in their life has nothing to do with me at all. I can think of those people for me. There have been people in my life that were only heavily involved for a little while, but who profoundly changed me, and thinking that I might be that person for someone else, either in the past or right this moment, is a little mind boggling.
Also: I'm almost 25. I'm not all "HOLY CRAP I'M SO OLD NOW" or anything, but it warrants a bit of pause to simply say to myself, "I have spent 25 years here (wherever I am) doing this (whatever I do) with these people (whoever they are) and this has been my choice." I mean, I have used various amounts of my time over the course of my life cultivating and strengthening relationships with people. Some of these people, these friends, these choices I have made will be sticking around for years and years and years. Inevitably, some friendships I have now will fade with time, but some of the people I know right now, that I have known for 8 years or 2 years will be a big part of my life for the rest of it. The sort of scary part comes in when I run around in circles with this idea and really dwell on the fact that you can't go back and try again. If I decide that I want new friends, I have to start over with new friendships and go from the very beginning. Not that there's anything wrong with new friends, but new friends aren't old friends. Old friends are special. They have passed some unspoken endurance test and stuck with you. They certainly didn't have to, and neither did you, but you both did and there is something so basic and secure about that. I love these friends.
0 comments:
Post a Comment