Since coming to the U.S. in 2011, I've made very few close friends. I guess it is not that surprising. I had very few close friends in Australia. There was a core of people that I knew from my school years and some that I met in the preceding years. I only seem to have the energy for a handful of people. Such is the intensity of my character.
The first separation from those relationships came about with the beginning of my own family. Once I became a father and was involved in the intricacies of fatherhood there was a slow drifting away from all my bachelor friends. They continued on their path of doing bachelor things and I was focused on raising small human beings without accidentally killing them. As my children grew older and those same friends began to settle down with their new families, we once more passed like ships in the night.
Many of my friends after that were people I met through my work. While we worked together we were close, but I was never in any occupation for long. The longest period I spent in any occupation was taxi driving, which was around fifteen years. I made some great friends in that industry. People who changed the course of my life. One in particular who was the prime impetus in my emigration to the U.S. But where are they now? They are in some distant reality that no longer has any relevance to me.
I have a good friend that I have made in my workplace currently. He is about 7 years older than me. We connected on a spiritual level, both of us having a sense of the divinity of the individual. He was a Marine in the Vietnam war. Afterward, he was a mechanic and became a master of his trade. When I first met him he was doing part-time work on disability. I think he found me somewhat of an inspiration and he became a loyal ally and confidante.
This week he struck another issue with his declining health. Another attack of gout. News of declining kidney function. Warnings of imminent heart failure or stroke. Here I find another friend who will soon pass out of my life.
I often said to my daughters that friends come and go, but family always remains. It seems somewhat hypocritical now as I find myself thousands of miles away from my daughters living a life completely disconnected from them. I was not always that close to my father. We became closer shortly before his death. I am still very close to my mother. We both have a good understanding of each other and share many common values. In the pursuit of finding myself, they are no longer so close that they understand my journey. They still offer me a connection though. Blood is so much thicker than water.
But friendships? I don't know who I will meet next in my journey of transient relationships. I rely on my own company more and more. The internet has been a comfort and I have met some beautiful and inspiring people online. Often it is hard to find people of common values and goals who happen to be inhabiting the same spatial dimension as me. My online friends are very dear to me, but even then I'm struck by the transient nature of these relationships. Disparate goals always intervene.
I guess it is my fate. My providential journey. I remember thinking to myself very early in life, is it more important to pursue a noble goal or to be the type of person to sacrifice a chosen goal for the companionship of others? In my mind, I saw the image of a scientist on the dogged pursuit of knowledge and revelation who has no friends, except perhaps for an adoring assistant who finds unrequited love in the object of her adoration.
Is it a travesty that a noble goal should be lost for want of company? I decided that the noble goal was the greater pursuit and now it is my reality. Do I regret it? I don't think I regret it. I experience its vicissitudes more personally, but I'm still enamored of its cause. It is a personal and private journey and most of the time, friendships and relationships will always be transitory things.
It is what it is, as my now slowly dying friend likes to say. There is no questioning it. There is merely the observation of its nature.
Transitions of the soul.
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I keep a few best friends and like you, I tend to socialize with those I work with. Since I have been working at home, this has made the way I maintenance my friendships difficult.
I really need to make some changes.
It seems that common goals have a way of uniting friends.
this struck a chord and it is true... Oddly enough before reading this I penned something a bit in the same tune because with the seasons changing am getting introspective. Solitude and having the existential gut kick of realizing that letting go of people, blood or not ...has been a personal lesson. Cousins I saw on holidays and vacations and such fade out , friends fade out, people you think you can't live your life without , fade out and my former best friends are all busy having babies and move. I've found solace in places unexpected and in people and it's been of cold comfort at times to realize that people I've never met and never will have provided more support then some who held me as a baby.
Such is life. Love comes at us from unexpected directions.