Many Worlds & Friendship

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. ~Henri Nouwen

As I have each year since 2001, I have thought about friends and family a lot this past weekend. There have been choices made that have altered relationships and the thought of "if I could only go back and do it over.." surfaces. I know that I would not want to go back and do over because each choice made affected something else in my life and the uncertainty of which things would no longer be is the lock on the time machine door.

Friends, unlike family, can decide to no longer be friends or at least to cease being there for the other person. I place a high value upon my friends. They are treasures beyond price and I fight with everything within me to hold on to those friendships. We might not see each other for years, separated by the different paths that we choose but I know that any time that our paths happen to cross that bond of friendship is still there.

And I would like to think that if the "many worlds" theory is true that each of these friends still travel with me on my life's journey. Those that, for one reason or another, choices made, were not as close as one would wish in this world, are the nearest and dearest in one of the other realities.

Friends not made in this world are within my circle there. Losses are spared by different choices that are made. Somewhere out there, in one of these worlds I am with my first love..in another it is the second, and so on. If one thinks on this for any length of time the possibilities are endless and it puts sorrow into the background.