976. Friends

I’ve been extremely lucky in life to have friends. They sustain us in dark times and good times alike. They know us for our flaws, for our lights, for the good and bad we bring to this world. In each of us is dark and light, saints and sinner, the elevating qualities of being a human and demons we struggle with, friends accept you just the same. As we do for them.

There will be a separate post about family because that’s a little different. Even though family are probably some of your closest connections in life, they do and don’t have a choice…they are your friends for life, whether they like it or not on some days. Adult friends do so by choice. They can opt in or opt out. I’ve been extremely lucky to find friends and the ones I do latch onto tend to stay that way years and years later. It’s a life thing with me I think.

Besides giving my kids the freedom to form who they are, a value set that can see them through life in good and bad times, to make decisions to do the right thing when the right thing is hard, one of the more important things is to allow them the space to foster friendships. People they will most likely know 30 years later. That’s the case with me as my group of Grapevine friends and I just yesterday hopped on a Zoom and had an impromtu Sunday afternoon Happy Hour, remote but connected. When one of our dear friends is struggling with a battle of the COVID it was a light in darkness to have them there to laugh, cuss, joke, and keep up with what is happening with our friends during this odd odd COVID shelter in place times.

So I have several groups of friends, the Zoomie friends, The G-vine Bullz, the Head Start’ers, the trail running Dirty Soles crew, the CWI’ers, and the Moutain Home back in the day crew. In tribute to them and as a means of gratitude, here they are below. You each don’t know how grateful I am that you are in my life.

We get by with a little help from our friends, We can try with a little help from our Friends. What would you do if I sang out of tune…. well with WWW and CC I do it all the time, and they still let me up there singing with them bringing the quality of the music down, down, down. That’s the beauty of friends. They seem to like you just the same, flaws and all.