Staying in touch with your past?

Here’s something scary that James (Nattress) and I were talking about: by the end of April, some of us (non-co-op students) will be halfway through university and soon we’ll become boring upper year students who have settled down from all the drinking and partying – although I hope I’m wrong! However, pretty soon we’ll all be married with children, working full time jobs and slowly losing the friendships we’ve built over the years in our schools and past jobs.

For some reason I feel that I haven’t done a good job in not only building friendships, but in keeping them. And lets be honest, most of you are in the same boat as I am and I can prove it! Out of the 80 or so contacts you have on you MSN list, how many have you spoken to in the last 4 months? Maybe about 1/4 of them? On my own MSN list I have all kinds of people who I haven’t messaged in ages; old friends from high school, past jobs, and even 1st year university. Forget about ex-girlfriends or those who we never really knew or liked – it’s better that we ignore those - but I am talking about the "casual" friends who’ve been nice to us but have drifted away. Y’know, the ones who have helped you get through the boring school hours and those tiring summer jobs over the years. For example, if I didn’t make so many friends at Wonderland I would’ve HATED that job, but I feel that I haven’t made an effort to preserve any of those friendships. The mistake I often make is I wait for them to contact me rather than taking the initiative to be the first to talk. I guess I’m less social than I once thought I was.

So now that midterms are almost done, here’s something I plan to do in the following weeks, and I suggest you all do the same - that is, take the time to contact some of those “forgotten friends” on your MSN list (before they delete you!) and see what they’ve been up to. Try to have a good long conversation with them rather than the usual “hi, how are you?... bye!”, and periodically check back with them to simply preserve that friendship. If you can meet up and have a drink with them – even better! But if they just don’t seem interested, don’t get upset over it - it’s not your fault as longs as you’ve made the effort.

Let’s face it: it’s hard enough to build a friendship, but even harder to keep it.