Little worlds

I remember my HS psychology teacher saying "Most of your friends in life will be determinded by their proximity to you. We tend to choose our friends according to their emotional availability to us and one of these factors is distance."

I don't know why his analysis stuck out in my mind but at the time, I thought it was a bunch of BS. In part, it was and I still remain in contact with some of my closest friends from HS (thanks internet and blogs!) but that doesn't prove that his point was wrong. Now that I'm 30, I've been able to look back upon some of the things I couldn't see from a distance 10 years ago, when I was first starting to understand the intricacies of friendship and relationships in adulthood.

One of my main preoccupations when I'm dozing off in the car on a trip or at night or when taking a jog is time passed. It seems that our world, our existence that we call it today, is an amalagam of our world that we've created at present and the little worlds that we've created in the past but nothing is constant and now will change to became then faster than I would like to get used to. We just start getting used to one of these little worlds and then all of the sudden something happens, someone moves, someone is added and your little world is no longer what it used to be and you move onto or into another one.

The best example I can give of my definition of little world is Sex in the City. I always admired how those women (fictional albeit) had their little Manhattan world full of going out, meeting up and attending various functions. A modern day Edith Wharton world. Maybe I felt a sort of attachement to this series because once, nearly 10 years ago, I was living my own sort of Sex in the City life (SORT OF is the key word here) in my own way in Norman. I had a group of friends and between teaching and taking classes I was always busy with something- either training for a race with my then best friend, grabbing a drink at happy hour, going to the only Indian Restaurant in Norman, attending a conference given by a professor, taking a hike in the Wichitas- always something literally every night. I left this little world the day I packed up my purple Honda Civic with literally every belonging I owned to drive to Houston where I would stay just a couple weeks before heading to France. The other day I smiled to myself because I remember, shortly after arriving in France, I missed this little world so much at the time, I went out and bought a dozen postcards that first week, sat on a café sidewalk somewhere between les Invalides and the slew of Embassies in the 7th and wrote about my experiences to a dozen people who, I realized over time, could not have cared less about receiving a postcard from me. To them, I had left their little world, I was gone and no longer in proximity and a postcard was just a silly whim sent by a silly 20 something to be either hung on the fridge for a month then thrown away or filed with the "postcards" file never to be thought about again and probably thrown away in the future. They didn't see that the very act of writing was me thinking I was still included in their world. I believe I tried for about a year after that to stay in that little world I had left probably too soon but then, slowly, I came to the reality that I had left and was creating a new little world in France.

The whole of my 20s was basically spent realizing the harsh reality of life: easy come, easy go. We create things, get used to them, then they leave, they fleet, they drift, and we can't stop their movement, like two of the same charges opposing each other. If Carrie hadn't come back to her little world during the last episode of Sex in the City, if she had continued living in Paris and then come back to visit her friends 5 years later, her "little world" wouldn't have been any longer and it was up to her to create another little world in Paris.

Just over the past couple years, I've started to create my own little world here, but it hasn't been a downhill slide. Instead, it's been a roller coaster of trials and errors. I miss going out but I also miss staying in. I miss having friends but I also like being alone. I love taking the kids to the park but I miss going out to eat and somewhere in all of that, it's been difficult to decipher what I really call my own little world. Along the road we've lost loved ones, we've lost friends, we've moved, we've changed jobs and maybe we just didn't stay in one little world long enough. But, one thing is constant that I wake up to and that I go to sleep to every night: my beautiful children and my husband and the Eiffel Tower I see out of my bedroom window. And, I guess for now, a little world like that you can't beat.

Comments

[Patricia]

Hi Andie, I check your blog often and enjoy reading it. This post resonated with me - I have moved around for the last 25 years, from Scotland to Germany to Canada and now to Hungary. Each time I move I try to keep in touch with the friends I have left behind. Many do not respond; as you said, you have moved out of their world and that's it. However, I'm glad to say that I do have contact with some, and those are generally the ones who have lived or travelled outside of their own towns - they understand that you can still care about someone and exchange ideas and follow their lives even if you are not physically in the same place. And just yesterday I was emailing with an old friend from university and reminding him that this year we celebrate 30 years of friendship - that gave me the warm and fuzzies!! Patricia

[Alice]

Really fascinating and thoughtful post... This kind of thing goes through my mind a lot too, about losing touch with people and how tough it is to STAY in touch in spite of the distance between us. I have kept in touch with only one or two friends from HS, but I recently heard from an old friend and we rekindled our friendship when I was back in the U.S. this time around for New Year's. So that gives me hope...

But I know that once I adopted my new life over here in France, it became my "own little world" as well... And I'm okay with that, although sometimes, every once in a while, I do miss being a part of my old friends' world back home...