Stoking fires
“I’m lucky to know a lot of really awesome people…and I’m lucky to get the chance to see a lot of them on this trip.”
— my journal, 15 April 2014
For the first time in possibly ever, I was a Good Daughter this past April. It took no small amount of doing, and I’m not sure I’ll ever do it again, but I did it. Most of what I did on this adventure was see people and manage relationships (including filial ones). I touched base with people I hadn’t seen in a while, I shored up relations with people I like to keep in touch with, and I saw family. Lots of it. Probably more than I have in the past five years put together.
Relationships are like little fires; you have to poke at them every now and then to remind them you’re there, lest they go out. Even in the cases with my oldest friends, people I might not talk to for years but fall so easily back in with, that effort of stoking the flames of friendship is necessary and worthwhile. I know this idea isn’t news to anyone reading this, but sometimes it doesn’t get the face time it deserves. It falls in the “important but not urgent” category of items that get shifted quietly to the bottom of the to-do list until they either become a problem or are forgotten altogether.
Most of the time you don’t get a month off with standby passes to run around and do all of this stuff though. I got lucky and had the opportunity to refresh as many connections as I could given time and scheduling constraints, and now that I’m home the trick is to remember to keep up with it through the daily grind of normal life. Some relationships are easy to maintain because they’re close and pleasant. Some are trickier because they’re less immediate, and the pleasures of maintaining them get deprioritized. And some, like family obligations, get neglected for far too long.
On Thursday I’ll tell y’all about the first leg of my trip south, to the places where I’m from, to visit family.
They are internal fires as well, I’ve felt very sad at seeing so many of mine go out since I changed my lifestyle.
Facebook and twitter are great ways of keeping in touch though, and they do help to keep contact. The hardest thing about not seeing people for a long time is that, paradoxically, I find you typically have very little to talk about: you’re back being strangers without context. With some rare, true friends, you get over this very quickly, but with others it almost increases the distance.
With nearly everyone I visited in April there was an initial awkward stage before the conversation settled; everyone needs to get over that “we’re back to being strangers without context” problem. It took longer with some people than with others, but I learned strategies for handling it.