There are people we are friends with for one major but often maligned or overlooked reason: because we were friends with them some time ago. At one stage, it might be decades ago now, we had a lot in common: we were both good at maths but bad at English at school and had a shared liking for table tennis; or we had adjacent rooms at college and used to help each other with assignments and commiserate in the bar about failed dates or maddening parents; or maybe we were interns in the same big firm with the same (as we thought at the time) bizarre and intemperate boss. But life has taken us on radically different courses.
Now they’ve got three young children and moved to central coast or they’ve gone into politics and have become a junior minister or they’re working as a ski teacher in the Snow Mountains. The daily realities of our lives may be miles apart; we may know little of their world and they of ours. If we were introduced today, we’d think each other pleasant enough but would never get close.
Yet it can be hugely helpful and very redemptive to catch up with these people, with a one-on-one dinner, a walk in the woods or the occasional email. These friends function as conduits to earlier versions of ourselves that are inaccessible day-to-day but that contain hugely important insights. In the company of the old friend, we take stock of the journey we have travelled.
We get to see how we have evolved, what was once painful, what mattered or what we have wholly forgotten we deeply enjoyed. The old friend is a guardian of memories on which we might otherwise have a damagingly tenuous hold.
We need old friends because of a crucial complexity in human nature. We pass through stages of development and as we do so, discard previous concerns and develop a lack of empathy around past perspectives. At fourteen, we knew a lot about resenting our parents. Twenty years later, the whole idea sounds absurd and ungrateful.
Yet the old friend reconnects us with a particular atmosphere and, like a novelist, makes us at home with a character – ourselves – who might otherwise have seemed impossibly alien to us.
We experience life from a succession of very different vantage points over the decades, but tend – understandably – to be preoccupied only with the present vista, forgetting the particular, incomplete but still crucial wisdom contained in earlier phases.
Every age possesses a superior kind of knowledge in some area or other – which it then, usually, forgets to hand on to succeeding selves. Remembering what it was like not to be who we are now is vital to our growth and integrity.
Old friends are key activators of fascinating and valuable parts of the self that we need, but are always at risk of forgetting we need, in the blinkered present.
Now they’ve got three young children and moved to central coast or they’ve gone into politics and have become a junior minister or they’re working as a ski teacher in the Snow Mountains. The daily realities of our lives may be miles apart; we may know little of their world and they of ours. If we were introduced today, we’d think each other pleasant enough but would never get close.
Yet it can be hugely helpful and very redemptive to catch up with these people, with a one-on-one dinner, a walk in the woods or the occasional email. These friends function as conduits to earlier versions of ourselves that are inaccessible day-to-day but that contain hugely important insights. In the company of the old friend, we take stock of the journey we have travelled.
We get to see how we have evolved, what was once painful, what mattered or what we have wholly forgotten we deeply enjoyed. The old friend is a guardian of memories on which we might otherwise have a damagingly tenuous hold.
We need old friends because of a crucial complexity in human nature. We pass through stages of development and as we do so, discard previous concerns and develop a lack of empathy around past perspectives. At fourteen, we knew a lot about resenting our parents. Twenty years later, the whole idea sounds absurd and ungrateful.
Yet the old friend reconnects us with a particular atmosphere and, like a novelist, makes us at home with a character – ourselves – who might otherwise have seemed impossibly alien to us.
We experience life from a succession of very different vantage points over the decades, but tend – understandably – to be preoccupied only with the present vista, forgetting the particular, incomplete but still crucial wisdom contained in earlier phases.
Every age possesses a superior kind of knowledge in some area or other – which it then, usually, forgets to hand on to succeeding selves. Remembering what it was like not to be who we are now is vital to our growth and integrity.
Old friends are key activators of fascinating and valuable parts of the self that we need, but are always at risk of forgetting we need, in the blinkered present.
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