Blog 3266 -10.11.2024

The Importance of Friends

One of the mysteries of the way that we experience time in this “time and space construct” is that with a certain amount of seniority, time seems to fly by. I recall when I was eighteen sitting in the barber chair having my hair cut by a barber who had cut my hair since I was ten. He asked me, “Son, how old are you now?” and I replied, “I just turned eighteen.” To which he said some words I have never forgotten, “Time is going to really start flying by for you now.” How right he was.

When I was five, the days seemed to crawl by. We had an expression back then that something was as “slow as Christmas” for it seemed an eternity on Christmas Day after all the presents were opened and the Christmas feast devoured till it would be Christmas again.

Even at ten years old when my family first moved to the community of East Lake in Chattanooga where the barber I mention above plied his craft, the three or so months of summer break each years seemed like a long long time full of play with friends and adventure away from the confines of teachers, books, and classrooms.

Every ten years or so I have noticed that in my seven decades plus current adventure in time and space that the more space and time I have experienced the smaller the world seems to be and the faster time seems to pass. I am reminded of the advice that I heard a man in his second set of teens once gave a reporter when asked the secret to living long and staying active and happy. He replied as if he had spend a lifetime coming up with the best answer to that question, which he quite literally had, “I have found the secret to a long and happy life is to continually be making new and younger friends because people soon tire of living and fail to see it as a wonderful adventure when they run out of friends.”

Like my barber friend, he was a wise man, who made friends of everyone he met.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White