Firm Foundations

The other day I noticed that my phone was pretty full of messages so I flicked through them and deleted several. While I was doing that I got to some messages I was sent by a friend with whom I had somewhat of a run in recently.

I am someone who tends to find moments of clarity about things. I can have thoughts whirring around in my head and suddenly I’ll gain some understanding. It isn’t necessarily that it in any way resolves the situation, but just gaining that understanding is something that makes a huge difference to me and I get this sense of ‘peace’ about the situation. I suppose it is important to me to understand what I’m dealing with so that, even if that turns out to be something bad, at least I do then know that. I think that sense of not knowing really gets to me and sort of scares me and so I have to slowly work it through in my mind and find out what is going on. I have had several moments of clarity about this situation and actually feel totally fine about it, but still it’s important to me to work out why things ended up such a mess. If we ignore history we are condemned to repeat it, as they say.

Anyway, I can see that while there was always this sort of ‘tension’ in our friendship, it went into a very sudden decline. Looking at the text messages rather illustrated this and gave me one of those moments of clarity. The thing I realised was that there was no real foundation to our friendship, so when we hit a rough patch there was nowhere to go back to and nothing to draw on in order to ride out the storm.

It is actually really unusual for me to argue with friends and so generally I don’t have to look to those foundations. Instead kind of take them for granted as a natural part of the friendship, but they usually get built up over time anyway. I mean things like understanding, trust, respect, empathy, being supportive and so on. But if you don’t put the foundations in place you potentially end up in situations that mean exactly the opposite marks out the relationship - so instead you *don’t* trust each other, or show understanding or any of those other qualities. Then when things maybe get a bit tough those negative qualities get magnified and you try and look at it objectively, which can be difficult when things are tense, and you end up thinking “But why would I want to do this?? Why would I want to go through this to try and fix something that actually isn’t very edifying??” and you have to ask yourself those more personal questions too, like “When have they ever learned that they could trust me or that I respect them or any of those other things that are fundamental to a proper friendship?” You look at the reality and realise there is nothing to save because the foundations were not put in place from the beginning.

Now there are a lot of reasons for that in this particular situation and I can see how things ended up getting a bit out of hand, but I’m not entirely sure that I know how to prevent that in future situations. Some of the answer I think is probably my natural reserve, which usually means that I do things in a ‘considered’ way (my, how exciting that sounds!). As a separate but connected point, my friend was rather more of a ‘living in the moment’ sort of person and those two things don’t necessarily mix all that well. So we were a bit at odds with each other and were doing things at a different pace. Friendship should be relaxed and enjoyable, it often is far more than that too, but it shouldn’t really be something that involves a lot of argument and disagreement because that isn’t good for anyone. A lot of those things are kind of obvious statements that I could have told you anyway, but it’s getting that understanding about the importance of foundations that has made the difference. If you build something on sand, when the storms come it will be washed away.