being there

Shauna Niequist, author of "Cold Tangerines", has recently released her second book "Bittersweet". Her writing captures pages of things that I believe and value and as I read I find myself saying, "Yes! Me too. I never knew how to explain it like that. This is totally my life."

I started this blog because I wanted a record of all the people my life was overlapping with each day. I'm reading this book just a chapter a night because I want to savor it and last night's chapter was about the very best friends and making sure you overlap with them.
Shauna was spending a long weekend with three friends from college and their three babies. She wrote,

"I realized why this kind of time together matters so much: beacuse 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 the being there, about being there to really see what's exactly the same and what's totally different about each one of us... I remember that the answers aren't necessarily as important as the questions and the company, and that if we do find answers, we'll find them together.
If you're lucky enough to have your Monica and your Sara and your Kirsten all right in your very 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 calender 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 awhile to make it work... We were made to live connected and close. So walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don't let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do-list...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."