Over the weekend my friend perceptively pointed out that as we grow older, make more conscious choices, and discover ourselves in this wild and wonderful world, we end up gravitating toward people more and more like ourselves, delighting in shared passions, resting in shared realities, grateful for new mirrors in which we find reflections of our own selves.
Perhaps therefore it’s inevitable that eventually it’s our oldest friends whom we find are most different from us. Over the years, those old familiar mirrors began to surprise me. At first, it seemed they had fogged up, then blurred, then cracked until finally they weren’t mirrors at all. Maybe we were unrecognisable to each other? I felt quite heartbroken for some time.
But this weekend I found to my delight that the mirrors have only morphed into windows now. Our thirty year old friendships, always replete with the comfort of childhood homes, invigorated with the headiness of shared adolescent explorations, afford us the privilege of intimate glimpses into hearts, lives and worlds most unlike our own today.
At school we heard, “Truth is a pathless land.” What joy it is to discover for myself that, indeed, the paths maybe countless but we can, even if only for an ephemeral weekend now and then, find our way back to one another. We can cut cheese and fruit, set a table, share secrets or crack jokes, and look through the most unexpected and precious windows of all.