How did we become friends?

On a long drive home recently, I decided to pass the time by catching up with my longest running friend (and truly the best friend a girl could ask for!). We chatted about the usual stuff - how's your job, how's your dog, let's plan a trip, what's happening in the next year, will you be my first born child's surrogate mother? WAIT? WHAT! Ok ok, that's not exactly how the conversation went, but it did get me thinking about how you get to that point in a friendship where it becomes okay to talk about stuff like that. And what is it that drives friendships? Sometimes it's the product of a situation like a job or a book club, or maybe it's your shared values like environmentalism or being an entrepreneur, or shared experiences like mourning the death of a loved one or riding the subway to work every morning, or maybe they've just been a part of your life for so long you can't imagine yourself without them.

I'm happy to say that I have friends because of all of these different kinds of situations and each of these friendships differ because of the things that brought us together. And, as varied are the ties that bind, are the means of maintaining. I have some friends that I talk to everyday and some that I could go months without any sense of connection, and one day pick up right back where we left off. In my mind, neither situation makes one person mean more to me than the other. I love all of my friends.

I can't wait to sit back in a rocking chair on my porch one day with the people that I have grown to love over the years and tell stories about us at different stages of our lives. It feels good just to sit back right now and take in the range of people that make my life worthwhile.