Better with Friends

When I pick my LG up from school, we sometimes end up stopping along the way at the local playground.  Sometimes, there's a group of her school friends there.  Other times, there are only children from other schools.  Children my LG doesn't really know.  The same is true when we visit family, or places further away.  She wants to play.  So she makes friends with the children she finds there.

I often watch her playing, and making new friends.  Some short lived, some much longer.  Like the LG we met on the walk to school, a friendship built on nothing more than the fact that 2 LGs were being herded down the same path, at the same time each morning, to get them to two different schools.  

After a while, they each started to look for the other, hoping each morning that we'd have left our respective houses in time to meet up at the start of the path. We often did.  And the girls became friends.  My LG actively asking to arrange to meet up, as she didn't get to play with her at school.  The ease with which that friendship was built, not caring about the logistical impracticalities of attending different schools.  They just enjoyed each other's company.  They still do.

Granted, there are times when my LG falls out with her friends.  Who doesn't sometimes?  But the key is in how we, as the adults in her life, try to support her to respond and navigate that sea of friendship.  She's doing pretty well ... 

But it strikes me that the older we get, the harder it is to make new friends.  Our lives are filled, and our time is scheduled to the last second.  Sometimes we're lucky, and as we grow apart from some of the friends we made at school or uni, we meet people who gel with us at work or in whichever social activities we've decided to continue into our adult lives.  

Too often though, making those new friends is hard, an often unclimbable mountain.  

Trying to break in to groups of people who seem to have known each other for years, who already have their friendship group is daunting.  And often fails.  When it fails, it can seem pointless to try again with another group.  Why pour all that emotional energy in to trying to build something that might ultimately fail?  

I'm relatively lucky.  I have a core group of friends I know I can turn to.  They aren't many.  They might not live in the same county (let alone town).  But they're there.  But maybe we should be more open to inviting and including new people sometimes ...

Maybe we should be a bit more like our children, and invite that new person to join in, just because we can.