This week, the world seems to have seen fit to show me new friends, new perspectives and encourage me to follow my path and find what joy it can bring. Sometimes, chance meetings with people you never expect are designed to make you re-evaluate yourself and your beliefs. A few days ago, I met someone who did just that: challenged me and pushed my boundaries and waited for me to push back. It’s good for me to rediscover my own boundaries and see over the years how they have shifted and changed and how they have stayed the same. If you or other people don’t challenge those things in you, you become stagnant, unchallenged and entrenched.

To re-examine your own perspectives or have someone who does the same isn’t the same thing as having someone agressively demand that you defend your beliefs. A good friend can do it by asking, enquiring and noticing. It’s what makes conversation flow, it makes ideas develop, it brings people together. It’s a creative process.

I often refer to myself as an unwitting creative, because I find that creativity exists in us in ways we often don’t recognise and can even more rarely imagine. I’ve worked in creative settings, I’ve worked in situations you wouldn’t consider creative but as I went my merry way through life, I find that creativity exists in places you often expect it least. It’s creativity that expands your mind to concieve of new ideas and find ways of putting it into practice. It’s creativity that helps me to find and articulate answers to questions I hadn’t considered. It’s creativity that broadens my horizons. And it’s creativity that opens my heart to new experiences, new perspectives and new friendships.

It’s nice to imagine that every fascinating and exciting person that happens into our lives will be a lifelong friend, and sometimes if we’re very lucky, they are. Sometimes, though, they’re a fleeting moment, designed to interact and inspire, to be a momentary muse in the tapestry of your life.

Last night, I found myself upon a number of occasions, stretched and challenged. I discovered which beliefs of mine stood firm, which I was happy to jettison. I opened myself up to new ideas and I grew. Opportunities and possibilites blossomed in my mind. I made connections that hadn’t occurred to me before. I understood things I hadn’t before. and I ENJOYED IT.

I want to be more than I am. I want to be everything I can be. I will only become that if I pay attention to the things people ask me and share with me, open my heart and mind and take chances that could change me.

They’re happy days, people. Happy days

Looking at our table of laughing, joking, gesticulating you wouldn’t have seen anything out of the ordinary, just a group of fun, happy, well balanced people. And so they were but also SO very much more. They are people whose spirit not only has triumphed against adversity but people who work hard daily to ensure that EVERY DAY they continue to triumph.

They are inspirational by virtue of no more than who they are. Their triumphs daily inspire my own and they themselves are such lovely people that they inspire help and support from the rest of us whenever they are in need of it.

They are the sorts of people who walk into a room full of strangers and SHINE. They can’t help it. They believe in life taking it by the horns and giving it a smacking kiss on the forehead. They make the world a brighter and more interesting place just by being in it.

While many of us get stuck in our ways: they are an education. They make a lifestyle out of constantly growing, changing, learning and consciously evolving. As their perspectives change, they challenge my beliefs and perspectives and I grow with them.

I know plenty of people who try too hard to be exceptional or extraordinary and by trying so hard, they miss the focus they were aiming for. Extraordinary comes when you know the ordinary intimately. Exceptional comes once you’ve embraced and appreciated the mundane. It comes when you stop trying to be who and what you’re not and be who you ARE to the best of your ability. It comes from having experienced both pain and hardship so that you can truly offer compassion.

They find joy in the smallest things and find wonder in everyday spaces. They know who they are and they know where they come from. They might not know where they’re headed but they make the journey a hell of a lot more interesting.

Image borrowed from here

Sometimes, right out of the blue, something happens that forces you to open your eyes to yourself, and when that happens, sometimes what you see isn’t what you’d like it to be … and sometimes that hits you like a fist in the solar plexus. It’s not a good feeling.

Yesterday I got sucker-punched by the Universe (and by Christ, it packs a punch, I can tell you!) which reminded me that sometimes, I really suck as a friend. Oh sure, I remember birthdays, I turn up when we hook up as much as I can. I offer a listening ear and occasionally, when asked, a bit of advice. But there are times when a friend has to be more than that. Sometimes a real friend looks behind the calls and texts that go unanswered and instead of assuming that  you’re busy, follows hunches and connects the dots, knows that you’re not as ok as you claim and stands up and calls you on it. And that’s what I forgot to do.

I got blindsided by my own worries and troubles and forgot to look out at my friends and see how they were doing. I became blinkered inside my own head and left my friends to fight their own battles, without picking up the phone and BEING there. It doesn’t take much, it’s a small thing to pick up a phone and let a friend know that you’re there and you care, and sometimes it’s the smallest of things that make the biggest difference.

We all have our highs and we all have our rough patches, it’s life and we deal with it but sometimes the highs are exceptionally high and sometimes the lows are so low that they almost require a new word and those are the times we most need a friend … to hold out a hand, to give us a hug, to just BE there.

It doesn’t matter how we make them but those connections are what make our lives, rich, fulfilled and wholesome, regardless of whether those connections are friends, family or lovers. They brighten our days, inspire us, support us, define us and occasionally frustrate the bloody hell out of us but for all their intangibility, they are the most REAL things we possess and we owe it to ourselves and each other to remember that and to put our friendships ahead of all those other distractions we indulge ourselves in, because one day long after our jobs are a distant memory, our friendships will remain and our memories of them will be more precious than any amount of money could buy.