reFLeCTIONS

Until recently, I had been under the misimpression that at some point in middle age you stop making friends of the heart. Turns out, I was wrong.

rides, compare notes on teachers, stats on admissions, advice on promotions. You probably socialize. Until one day, kids have grown and gone, you’ve moved on to a new job or new city, and just a handful of those earlier connections remain a part of your life. Some though become “friends of the heart.” They strike some chord in your soul. With them you continue to go deeper. They know your vulnerabilities, you know theirs. You tell more, they share more, sometimes you cry, all the time, you laugh. One positive of Facebook is that it supports connection with friends who blur this divide of road and heart. The opportunity to keep in touch with, if not just tabs on, friends from a past work life, old neighborhood or from childhood is so fun, and sometimes, so heartbreaking. Just last week in a Facebook group of my graduating class, I learned of the sudden death of one of my closest high school friends. Our lives had taken such different paths, we didn’t keep in touch for nearly 40 years. Yet I loved her. Deeply. At one time, she knew me and I knew her as well as we knew ourselves. She was funny and smart and fiercely loyal. Nora was a friend of the heart.

Until recently, I had been under the misimpression that at some point in middle age you stop making friends of the heart. You just double down on the ones you have, nurturing them through formal reunions, weekend trips away, “wine dates” over the phone.

Turns out, I was wrong.

Since I’ve reached my fifties, friends of the heart have entered my life in abundance.

Advice on making new friends later in life echoes my lived experience. The more I involved myself in ventures that sparked my interest — whether a leadership program, a spiritual retreat, a writing group, a non-profit — the more I found “my people.”

The process of getting to know these friends almost seems like reverse engineering. Instead of catching an old friend up on your life, you take new friends of the heart back in time to let them know about key moments they missed, key people you wished they had known, like departed parents.

Sometimes life seems like “you’re always stuck in second gear, when it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month or even your year.” It’s a total surprise and delight that the next line from the Friends’ theme song — “I’ll be there for you”— grows ever broader and deeper, the identities of “I’ll” a bounty expanding with time.