Knowing How Way Leads On To Way

There’s something very naive about thinking the friends you had in high school (or university, or primary school, or whatever) will be your ‘bestest’ [sic] friends forever. Yet I keep noting some variation of this theme in my life. It is almost as if I don’t believe in change and want things to be constant. I guess, in some ways, I do. I like stability. I want things that are reliable. But life’s not really like that. In the same way you wouldn’t expect these days to keep the same job until you retire, you can’t really assume that the people you know now will be those you hold nearest and dearest in times to come.

I’m not talking about big fights or burning bridges either. It can be such a gradual thing that you might not even notice it. You’re both growing as individuals, and, perhaps, you’re also growing apart.

I’ve had this gnawing feeling for some time about one person in particular that I don’t really understand them, that I can’t get excited about what they’re excited about – and I sort of suspect the reverse is also probably true. I can go back to the beginning of the friendship and identify one thing we had in common, and I wonder is that the thread everything hinges upon?

I see some of their interactions with other people, what we might call their ‘actual’ friends. Those people get it! They really do understand. They’re as excited as the individual in question and that excitement nudges each of them on to bigger and better things. All the while I’m sitting on the sidelines wondering what happened, and why it happened.

I feel a certain amount of wistfulness about this. But I’m not sure what I can do about it. The older I get – and man, I feel old – the more I realise it is better to accept things as they are, rather than to hold on to visions of how you wish they were. There’s integrity in accepting truth. Is this settling? Perhaps…

I studied Robert Frost in high school English. ‘The Road Not Taken’ is always cited as an inspirational poem about doing something unique, about being an individual. On some level that might be true. But you have to remember that the poem is called ‘The Road Not Taken’ not ‘I Took The Road Nobody Goes On; I’m So Badass.’ For me there is something so wistful about this poem. It’s about regret. It’s about acknowledging that you can’t do it all and have it all, that you have to make decisions and by definition those decisions choose certain things to the exclusion of others.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We ignore the sigh and go straight to ‘the difference.’ We read ‘the difference’ as ‘a vast improvement.’ But I don’t think that’s what Frost is getting at. It’s just different. He hasn’t traveled on that other road, he’ll never be in a position to compare and contrast them and decide which is better. And there will always be a part of him left wondering…

Tagged as: change, friendship, growing apart, growing up, Robert Frost