So, I am a big Shauna Niequist fan. I read her first book, Cold Tangerines in an hour. So, when her new book, Bittersweet, came out- I was one of the first to grab it. And, I was excited to meet her and have it autographed at the leadership summit at church...because she is our pastor's daughter. : )
The last 11 days we have been in Italy. It has been beautiful, chaotic, and fun at the same time. We have had a lot of time with family we don't get to see very often, have seen some beautiful sites, and taken a million pictures- which I will talk about and share more about when we return home. But, for now, I wanted to share about something I read today...
During quiet time I was fortunate enough to have this afternoon, I was able to read a few essays in Shauna's new book. The one that captivated me and struck me to a core was called Alameda.
In this essay, Shauna talks about how one of her fondest memories was a weekend when she and three of her closest friends got together in a rented house for a long weekend with three of them towing small babies along. Since they couldn't fit in a car, they walked all over the place enjoying lattes, ice cream, and late night talks. She reminded me of how incredibly important that time with friends is in our lives-- and I want to share a few passages of it with you.
"I realized why this kind of time together matters so much; because there are things you can't know, and questions you can't ask, and memories you can't recover via email and voicemail. It was about being there to really see what's exactly the same and what's totally different about each one of us"...
Sometimes we don't make time for our friends- time to really get together and BE together. Being here with my family in Italy has reminded me of just how important this time is. The minute we got off the plane we were surrounded wtih love and affection- and it was like we never were apart, even though there were people I hadn't seen in four years. There were two new babies I hadn't met-- but the love is there without effort. That is how good friends are too.
"Because we had the time, because we could let conversations wind and unwind, because we could start them at dawn and pick them up again in the afternoon and add a few more thoughts in the evening, we circled down to the places you never get when you just see one another at weddings, giving out funny sound bytes over bites of cake".
The Italian lifestyle is another example of how to live life with your friends-- lunches take 3 hours. No one rushes. There is lots of food and wine, and no one is in a hurry to leave the table. Dinners-- they take 4 hours...and are several courses. The conversations flow and I could not think of a better way to end the day than to spend several horus in great conversation with people who mean a lot to me. I love that Shauna commented on this.
"There were more questions than answers that weekend. What do you do once you've written a dissertation? How do you walk away from a decade of work, even if you don't necessarily love it? How do work and babies and dreams and marriages and mortgages fit together in one life, and if something has to give, what gives? I still don't know the answers to a lot of those questions, but I know that right in this moment, as I sit at my kitchen table and remember those days, I remember that the answers aren't necessarily as important as the questions adn the company, and that if we do find answers, we'll find them together.
Real friends do life together. Just like families. The big issues are shared issues and the weight is carried by all. I need to know that my friends will be there for anything I need to talk to them about-- and for them to know I offer the same. Nothing less.
Shauna goes on to say, "If you're lucky enough to have your Monica and your Sara and your Kirsten (her friends) all right in your own town, I hope you soak it up, and that you lie around in each other's backyards every Saturday afternoon or stay up late on one another's porches three nights a week. But if you're like me, and if those faces are far away, get a weekend on the calendar and get there. Share your life with the people you love, even if it means saving up for a ticket and going without a few things for a while to make it work. There are enough long lonely days of the same old thing, and if you let enough years pass, and if you let the routine steamroll your life, you'll wake up one day, isolated and weary, and wonder what happened to those friends. So, walk across the street, or drive across the town, or fly across the country, but don't let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. Good friendships are like breakfast- you think you're too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky half way through the day, and discover your attempt to save time totally backfired. In the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don't have time or because your house is too messy to have people over or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. But halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you'll realize in a flash that you're breathtakingly lonely, that the Christmas cards aren't much company. Get up, make a phone call, busy a cheap ticket, open your front door. Because there really is nothing like good friends, like the sounds of their laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments."
Being here, after four years, has been a lot to catch up on. I am going to make sure that with my friends and my family don't go that long without talking to me. I tend to be a busy person, but I am going to make sure to make time for what matters- and that is people.
So, as I sit here in Italy, I have some thoughts in my head of how my life is going to be a little bit different when I get home...because of Shauna's book, because of the lessons learned from Italian culture, and because of the way the two impacted me at the same time.