Friend – ship
Just over a year ago my awesome-est friend and I were struggling to keep touch. Both of us have things that won’t sit still – her with her two kids and me with my schedule.
After numerous failed skype dates an idea was born.
Why don’t we just try to email each other one sentence a day? Shouldn’t that be enough to keep in us touch – for both the big events, as well as the day to day?
That was just over a year ago, and somehow we’ve managed to keep the habit.
A sentence every day has mostly translated into a paragraph two or three times a week. But as my friend wisely pointed out – what kept us going was the knowledge that we could *just* write a sentence. That was the rule. And it was the rule because of two of my favourite pieces of life advice:
- You are what you do everyday; and
- It just doesn’t matter what you don’t do in life. It only matters what you do decide to do.
(As a side note, I love this piece on Steve Martin. “I remember getting my first banjo, and reading the book saying ‘this is how you play the C chord,’ and I put my fingers down to play the C chord and I couldn’t tell the difference.” “But I told myself, just stick with this, just keep playing, and one day you’ll have been playing for 40 years, and at this point, you’ll know how to play.”)
I’ve compiled some of these emails into a book for her birthday and I was struck by the picture of the year that was painted. From the hilarious mundane (“Yesterday I put white pepper instead of salt on my chicken curry”) to the advice (“BREATHE!”) to the life changing and occasionally sad (“I resigned today”). We have both managed to achieve a lot in the last year. But seeing it all in one place also reminded me that “the days are long but the years are short”.
Happy birthday Asteroid! Thanks for being my friend.
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Image credit: Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney
