The View from Here: Time with friends is time well spent
Some time ago, I interviewed four women who have remained friends for more than 50 years.
It struck me as a good human interest feature back then because of the strength of their bond and the time that has elapsed since they first met, and I guess still does strike me that way.
During the interview, however, I couldn’t help thinking about how different the women’s experiences were from my own.
The women, most of whom were able to remain physically together throughout their lives, reminded me that most of my generation won’t have that same experience.
Time was precious to the women, there was no doubt, but time is even more precious today. Since Americans have become increasingly disconnected from each other, time is everything.
So when someone asked me if I’d be willing to spend my day off working at an event on the day my friends were visiting, this was one time where my natural tendency to people please was overshadowed.
If I could have explained it better, it would have gone something like this: The people who know me best – the ones who know I’m not some snoopy reporter to be treated like evil (I wrote some of their term papers for early practice, after all) and the ones who laughed and cried with me over growing pains – were going to be around, flying in from out of state for the first time in several years.
If I did something else, I would never get that time back.
And, I would have explained, if we’ve changed at all in a year as a public, perhaps we’ve had a collective epiphany that we don’t spend enough time with the people we truly care about.
That’s the big difference between the 80-something women interviewed last year and this gathering of people who decided out of the blue that enough time had elapsed since we’d seen each other last: We really don’t spend enough time with each other.
How fortunate the women were. Today, baking dishes for each other after a newborn or bringing each other chicken noodle soup or just having a trusting ear to bend seems nonexistent.
Rather, visiting and showing long-distance friends you care is demonstrated by a phone call that you don’t want to make. Most people don’t want to spend 10 cents a minute complaining and having someone yank at them while trying to cook dinner and wash the dishes so they can relax a little sooner, only to have a 16-hour day again the next day.
And the time they do manage to snatch to spend with old friends will be spent trying to catch up on major life events after breaking the ice and realizing that life hasn’t been about hair, makeup and gossip for eons.
That would have been the long way of explaining why there was no way I could work that day.
It is the modern-day counterpart to the women’s story. I wondered, if the world has become a worse place because mothers got careers like they say, who knows how losing their most basic support systems changes things?
From my perspective, our experiences are already so much different than our grandmothers’, they would likely frown upon what we’ve allowed ourselves to miss out on. We can make other friends, but they’re not as good as the ones you have history with.
And if we were a little less comfortable with being so disconnected from people who know us best, we might do something more to keep our best friends in our lives.
(Amy Satterwhite is a reporter for the Standard. She can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)