“I kept looking at P today with wonder, like “Omg, we were 18 when we first met each other.”
“The heart knows its ties . . .” (texts I sent last night to my best friends from college. We had been boating all day with P, and her husband. P is one of my very best friends from college. My husband and I, and P and her husband, all graduated from James Madison University, which sits beautifully in the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia. JMU is truly one of the most lovely places on Earth. There’s a magic there that can’t be explained in words. It softly and gently transitions young people into adults, like no other place that I have ever experienced. It’s like a beautiful silk cocoon nestled in the valley, holding it’s charges while molding them at the same time, without us even realizing it. Perhaps that’s why we keep close ties with our friends from JMU. We all know and understand the specialness of this magic.)
Lifelong friendships are so interesting. Change is the only constant, and who you are at age 18, is not at all who you are at 50, and there have been many versions of you, and also of your friends, all along the way. That’s what’s really special about lifetime friendships. There is an allowance of each other’s morphing and growing and transitioning and refining and reforming, and yet, throughout all of that, you still really like each other. You still want to spend time with each other. There is a naturalness to lifelong friendships that is hard to come by, in a world full of judgment, “cancel culture”, and everyone vying for their own fifteen minutes of glory. Lifelong friendships are a comfortable and a reliable and a sheltered place to rest your heart in, from time to time. What a blessing!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.