I’ve spent the weekend contemplating friendship, off and on. Saturday I got to spend some time with a friend, just sort of hanging out. Sunday I was at a baby shower where the guest of honor was surrounded by lots of friends who had known her from various stages in her life. And then yesterday I finally put in that phone call to another friend I hadn’t talked to in close to two months (and I count her as a really good friend – shame on me!). Had to put in that phone call – seeing the folks at the shower made me think about whether I’m putting in enough into some of those relationships – whether I’m letting them wither on the vine, and if so, why.

Folks claim that life is busy – that there’s just no time to cultivate friendships. But I look back at folks in times past, and I really can’t see that they were any less busy. If you go back to a farming era, well, cows certainly don’t let you put them on hold or screen their moos for milking. And if you worked in a factory, the 40 hour workweek is a relatively recent idea. Life is always busy – that’s probably just a characteristic of life, whether you’d count a busy life as well-lived or not.

I have a working theory that we don’t put enough priority on our friendships because those folks aren’t stuck with us the way our spouses and families are – because we actually have to pay attention to something other than just us. And we don’t, and we just sort of justify it with the excuse of ‘busyness’. Was I too busy to play too many rounds of GLine (my latest stupid PC game addiction, replacing Minesweeper), or to browse JavaRanch, or to write this blog entry? Couldn’t I have put in a call, tried to make some sort of connection\?

Wish I had a magic potion answer, a resolution that I’d avow to keep. Unfortunately, I know me too well. . . I’ll make more of an effort, to be sure, but it’s just too easy to say, well, they haven’t called me, either. Periodically I’ll poke my head up and look at the ‘fruits’ of my friendships, and realize they’re woefully underfed. And I’ll mentally whine about it, and then go back to putting dots on a GLines gameboard.