friends

(Re)Discovery 1: Friendship

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
C. S. Lewis

(Re)Discovering friends will never cease to amaze me.
Do you still remember your best friend(s) from school? Can you picture how your friendship could look like now, (many) years later? Perhaps you can’t, or perhaps they are still your best friends. But what is certain is that you all have changed over time and (re)discovered your friendship in different ways.

I completely lost touch with my best friend from high school. Our paths simply went into different directions after we entered university and we never heard from each other again. It seems a natural process to me and I didn’t really think about it so much.

It was not until 3 years ago when I met Eli, a school mate of mine I had not seen for more than 10 years, that I was reminded of my high school friends. Eli and I weren’t close friends in our teenage years. We neither spent much time together nor seemed to have too much in common back then (or at least we never had the chance to look into any possible common ground for friendship).
To our surprise, this reunion made a huge difference to both of us. We (suddenly) had so much to share that we spent hours and hours talking, laughing, telling stories… Stories about our experience living abroad, our culture, our surprisingly similar or complementary attitudes, our struggles and moments of serendipity. It seemed the right time had come to (re)discover our friendship which is now a continuous source of inspiration, understanding, trust, meaning.

Did you have the chance to (re)discover ‘old’ or ‘new’ friendships?

“The language of friendship is not words but meanings.”
Henry David Thoreau