Slept in today. Needed it, clearly. Made coffee, ate pastries (again, how great are pastries). Chores. Walked the dog. Picked up snacks. Watched the Super Bowl for the first time. I mean, I didn’t, but we were invited by two of our (excellent) friends to watch the game, and we gladly accepted. We ate snacks and talked and had a great time. I watched a little (sort of).
It’s funny, it was a regular hang and yet for the past 3 years (since moving from the U.K. to the U.S.) it’s been the most rare kind of hang. Moving 3,000 miles twice within a couple of years means that it’s hard to build the sort of friendships where you have “regular” hangs. The kind where you’re at someone’s home, and you feel at home there.
When I started writing this daily blog, I started by saying that I wanted to build community. A few months later I said that I’d started to, but I was really talking about community built around (basically) work. That’s great, and I’m so thankful, but it wasn’t really the kind of community I was talking about. Not entirely, at least. Not primarily, even.
The kind of community I’d been missing was this kind. The kind that’s more difficult to describe, but that feels like it enriches your soul. The sort of friendships that are built upon the very idea of friendship, and aren’t based on (or dependent on) some specific, shared thing. The small things are the big things, it turns out. They probably always were.