I’ve had the following conversation with a number of different friends over the years, and it always seems to ring true. Having just enjoyed a whirlwind midweek getaway with friends I have had since college, where we got to catch up and talk about so many people we knew back in the day and how they’re all doing and how we all linked up to each other, memories spanning over fifteen years, I’ve never been more sure of this perspective.

There are different kinds of friends. Some friends are people you casually spend time with and they’re in your life to bring a little more light and relief. With others, you have deeper connections and they bring more gravity. Sometimes a friendship is the type where you talk almost all the time and see each other often and you’re very involved in each other’s lives, while at other times, a friendship is such that you talk more infrequently and see each other rarely, but every time you do get together, you can pick up old threads as if you’ve never been apart, no matter how long it’s been.

Sometimes friendships are fleeting, and sometimes they’re enduring – and sometimes they endure, until they don’t. And while the end of a friendship is certainly cause for sadness, an important consideration is to be as grateful as you can for the connection you had while you had it.

If you consider humans to be made of stardust, friendships and interpersonal connections are really just some fucking beautiful cosmic dances, aren’t they? People come and go around each other, there are relatives and friends and neighbors and acquaintances and total strangers weaving a complex tapestry of countless interactions day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year. We are all so busy with our own lives that when we finally have a chance to stop and let our memories catch up and regard just how many people have crossed our paths, people we remember in passing or people we have in common with others or people we know in one way that other people know in other ways, it can be astonishing to think about. There are literally billions of people on this planet, and it’s truly an infinite number of random circumstances that overlap to bring certain people into and/or out of our lives. I can only speak for myself, but I’m grateful for every single person who’s ever been a friend to me, whether that friendship has survived to today or not. I am grateful for every kind stranger I’ve ever encountered. I am grateful for people I know now, and for people I used to know and don’t anymore.

In particular, I want to mention that I am utterly astonished by and grateful to every single person who’s ever read the words I’ve written, who’s decided that the words inside my head that I manage to get strewn across a page are worth putting their eyes to. I’ve been maintaining this blog as a weekly-ish commitment for just about a year now, which is incredible in itself, given the insanity of my life. But, even more incredible than my writing consistently every week, is that people are out there reading it every week. For that, I humbly thank you all.

One thing I can be sure of, in a world where I’m feeling increasingly unsure about a lot of things, is that this cosmic dance here is just getting started.