After the last three and a half years of travelling all year around zigzagging across North America, I’ve come to realize how important friendships are. You can’t remain emotionally sane with only one person in your life – although I have tried.
When you are constantly traveling you do meet some great people, but I’ve always been a firm believer in friend chemistry and the fact that great friends can’t be found in all places all of the time. You can’t decide to just pick up a new one. In fact, the planets have to be aligned and there has to be just enough spark and just enough interest on both sides to form a true ‘two peas in a pod’ friendship.
And let’s be honest. Friendships are a lot of hard work. It’s not enough to click ‘like’ on someone’s photo, to text them once in a blue moon and say, ‘what’s going on? ‘ and not care that you don’t receive a response until 3 weeks later. To all of my friends out there – that three week lag time pains me! I go on a rant about long distance friendships, one-sided efforts and why do I care SO much. That is, until I get that phone call/bbm/text from you, that reconfirms why we are indeed such great friends. But by the way, call me anytime, regardless what time zone I’m in – if I’m sleeping I won’t pick up, but I will sleepily look at my phone and smile, knowing that you’re thinking of me.
No, a friendship cannot survive on social media alone. Well, they can, but I’ve realized over the last few years that keeping that strong emotional bond that you had with your childhood or university friends, where you spent 20 hours a day with a person, could finish each other’s sentences, and really just didn’t want to have any special moments without them, can’t be sustained with a quick catch up every once in a while. Yes, you do marvel at the way that you can pick up where you left off even though it’s been months since you’ve talked, and maybe even years since you’ve seen each other. But when you’re not in someone’s day to day life (and often you aren’t) then you hear the quick highlights like (yep I finally travelled to Africa – that was fun – and then I met the man of my dreams, blah, blah, blah, he proposed and a year later we got married. So here I am, a wife and mother of 5. That’s about it, what about you?’ And since you’re not part of the day to day lives, a lot of times you resort to reminiscing about those youthful times when you stayed up all night watching Disney movies, sang karaoke and they kicked you off the stage or when you curled up together on the couch, post graduation but pre-career wallowing in self pity, but still positive because you were about to embark on a Project Runway marathon.
So I guess what I’m trying to say, is if a friendship is important to you (and again, it’s hard to make those really special new friendships when you’re travelling all the time), it is so important not just to play catch up but to actually create new memories. Yes, it could be as glamorous as a Vegas weekend where you have to kick yourselves out of the hotel room because it’s just so much fun trying to learn the ‘Single Ladies’ dance after a box of wine. (Yes, I did say BOX). Or it could be as cosmopolitan as jetting off to LA for a “Ladies Who Lunch” weekend, which just happens to coincide with the Glee concert.
Ladies who Lunch (at Universal Studios)
But, it could be just as easy as having a few good friends over to your house in a very rare moment in time when you can all get together, to eat, drink and stay up until 3am making sundaes and chopping up candy with a mallet (or meat tenderizer…whatever) – just because that’s all you want to do. It also doesn’t hurt to play Taboo and reestablish all of those memories, especially if you’re playing against people who don’t have your intense friendship history. They wouldn’t even know what to do if you yelled out, “Fiona apple! Song that we sang at the top of our lungs at a McDonalds drive thru! Aka. Paper Bag”.
Yes, that is a meat cleaver...
The morning after 3am sundaes...a little rough but the view was great!
Not that I want to get into that whole new years resolutions thing, but it is the start of a new year, and yes, although life is busy, don’t you just feel giddy at the thought of spending some real quality time with your friends? Even a phone call that lasts 10 minutes (that doesn’t consist of negative ranting) seems to have long lasting residual effects on my happiness level (which all those around me appreciate).
So here’s to spending some great time with friends, and being able to reminisce about these new memories as long as you’ve reminisced about the old ones. Oh, and remember to take photos….and keep them somewhere safe – you’ll want to remember these times!
Adventures On the Road 