Old Friends Stalking Dreams

Those we no longer see continue to haunt our dreams.

This is problematic for me.  It is probably also indicative of the way that the world has changed.

Many years ago - heavens, even within my parents' generation - one would largely stay in the place where one was born or raised.  One would see the same people - one's friends - for long periods of time, indeed perhaps for their entire lives.  For better or worse, these were the people that inhabited one's landscape.

We are a much more mobile society now, both practically and personally.  Not only do we move more frequently and more often, we have the ability to keep in contact with people literally all over the world.  Like anything else, in some ways this is a wonderful thing - I've made acquaintances throughout the world now - but in some ways it is bad as well.

One problem is we lose a sense of permanence and perhaps even of true friendship.  People tend to move and so friendships break up and dissolve or become simply something that we have until one side simply moves on due to distance or business.  Commitment - the commitment of a friend - becomes very much about vicinity.  We say that true friends are people that we can call in the dead of night in an emergency, but is that really true?  The space creates distance and before long calling becomes something we would only do in an extreme emergency.

Another problem is that the nature of friendship changes.  It becomes largely a matter of convenience, of people being around.  Cross-pollination between yourself and people unlike you becomes difficult unless one seeks it out as our lives become rooted in the things that are directly happening at us.  At one time we had shared experiences between people we perhaps did not share that much with (we thought, until they became our friends); now we struggle to find even one person that is not someone we by default share a great deal with.

Finally, the expectations of friendship change.  We build friendships - perhaps even intimate ones - only to find that time and distance and life erode them to an occasional phone call or visit.  We all believe - or say we do - that we continue to maintain heart-cord attachments but too often this only sounds like a platitude rather than a real thing.  And then something happenings:  we come to expect less of our friendships.  People come only to go away.  Relationships exist only so long as we share that particular experience.  The expectation of what friendships means has become minimized to what is going on - right now - in my life.  When those circumstances change so will the relationships - often it seems without some sort of formal notification, just a realization after the fact that people have moved on and are not coming back.

But our heart and mind try to know better.  They still see them, stalking the edges of our dreams and our hearts when we are not looking.