The Havamal on Friends

[nyyki]

119) Hear thou, Loddfafnir, and heed it well,
learn it, 'twill lend thee strength,
follow it, 'twill further thee:
If faithful friend thou hast found for thee,
then fare thou to find him full oft;
overgrown is soon with tall grass and bush
the trail which is trod by no one.

This is an interesting comment from about 1100 years ago regarding friendship and reciprocity. There are a lot of folks I reach out to on a regular basis who never bother to make the effort to contact me. I've been questioning how much I need these folks in my lives if they cn't be bothered to make even the slightest effort to keep the friendship alive? Are they really friends?
I know friendship is an individual thing -- one person can consider another person a friend while the other person sees the first person as only an acquaintance. And I also know there are a lot of folks out there who do not manage their lives, their lives manage them and they shoot around like a pinball in a machine, with the bumpers and targets and flippers of fate providing their motive force. But I don't know that I'm comfortable being that motive force 100% of the time in my interaction with them.
So I'm reevaluating a lot of things with my friendships, real or alleged, these days.

Comments

[kerinda.livejournal.com]

I think there is a lot of drawing inward on many people's parts in these days - it seems our culture is tending towards isolationism, and I can see it in myself too. This is unusual, because I used to be hugely extroverted.

My point, i think, is that what may seem like "Not bother" to you may in fact be "I'm inward", two different phenomenon that show the same outward expression.

<3

[nyyki.livejournal.com]

That may be, but the real effect is the same. Folks aren't tending their garden of friends, and it runs the risk of becoming overgrown and neglected. I feel that the stress of our society and a general feeling of unsafeness is contributing to that, but in many cases this predates the current days. I have someone I can only think of now as a former friend because he moved almost a year and a half ago and still has yet to provide me with his phone number. There's not much ambiguity in that type of action. And statements like "I meant to call you" without any followup start to ring false when oft repeated.