The big chill

I’m still in a dark mood but now I’m feeling more nostalgic. I received some bad news this week. An old friend I haven’t seen in a very long time lost his wife suddenly over the weekend. He now has three little girls to raise on his own.

I feel bad on many levels. First and foremost, I feel terrible for my friend and the pain he must be feeling right now. But I also feel bad that I lost touch with someone, a good friend, who used to be a very important part of my life.

He was one of a group of friends in college – our gang. We would all get together and do the usual college stuff. We’d get on each others nerves and have our petty dramas and arguments but most of all we had fun and we all really cared about each other. We were all friends. And we all said we would keep in touch after college and like most college students – we didn’t.

Relationships waiver, new romances form, people move away and we all get busy with jobs and families and new petty dramas and arguments. Suddenly ten years or more slip by and you wake up wondering what happened to that person.

There’s only one good thing about a funeral – it brings people back together. It gets you back in touch with people you haven’t seen in a long time; friends you didn’t mean to lose but somehow lost sight of along the way. Life is too short and friends are too important to forget.

So if you’re sitting there reading this and it’s got you thinking about an old friend you haven’t talked to in a while, what’s holding you back? Dig out the old address book, pick up the phone and call some old buddies. Google them if you have to but do something. Whoever your friend is they were really important to you at one time. Don’t wait for tragedy as an excuse to get back in touch with them. Give them a call and find out what’s going on in their life. You may discover that your “old” friend is the best “new” friend you ever had.