An old friend of mine was in town this weekend and so we got to spend some time together, which was very nice. It’s funny: we don’t agree about a lot of things (the joke is that each thinks the other completely, horribly, awfully wrong about everything—save for the things we agree on), but nonetheless we’d a very pleasant day (yesterday evening & most of today).
Something I’ve realised with Shaima’s visit, and my own visit to see Phil & Jess in Texas (along with all the others I saw) is that friends—not acquaintances, but real friends—are one of the few key things in life. It’s not so much the frequency that one sees them, but that one sees them at all, that one has a few kindred spirits out there. C.S. Lewis wrote much more eloquently on φιλία than I ever could, and his words are worth reading.
One of the bad things about seeing one’s friends so rarely, though, is that it takes time to fall back into things, although as I’ve noted given a short amount of time it all works out. That’s definitely an issue which more time together rather than apart would help.
So if someone would just break the laws of the universe and invent a teleporter so that I might see my friends every week, no matter where on the globe they are, I’d be much obliged.
