“Friendship, like a garden, needs to be cultivated to blossom and grow. When good friends become strangers, it’s a sad thing”. This is a quote I came across in a magazine recently and it struck a chord with me. Sometimes, I find myself reminiscing about the past and I think of my friends. I remember the good times we shared, in high school, college, grad school and at work and I feel nostalgic. I have lost touch with a lot of them and sometimes I wonder why. Did we grow apart? Or did we just fail to take the time to keep in touch?
I called up a good friend whom I had lost touch with recently. We exchanged pleasantries but the conversation was stilted at best. We ran out of things to talk about and it was very awkward. This was someone I had shared a better part of my childhood and youth with. After the call, I knew neither of us was going to bother getting in touch again. The relationship had fizzled out.
This got me thinking about what I could have done better to stay in touch with my friends, at least the great ones whom I wished we had remained in contact. Some of these may have been my fault; not returning calls, failing to show up at a special occasion, not calling on birthdays and other important milestones or better still, not just calling for the heck of it. After a while, you wonder why bother? What are we going to talk about anyway? And there goes the end of a friendship.
Despite this, I’ve still got friends whom I talk with regularly. Whether it a month or two in between calls, we still have stuffs to talk about. So, I often wonder, what is the difference? Have I taken the time to cultivate these friendships more than others? Or do we just share the same interest that makes conversation easy no matter how long? I really don’t know.
Whatever the case maybe, it is better to find time to keep in touch with good friends; phone calls, emails, social media. There is a plethora of ways nowadays to keep in touch. It is never too late to chat up old friends you have lost touch with also. I will be doing this in the coming days. Who knows, it may be the beginning of new adventures over again.