Circles of friends

Friends are the jewels that one accumulates over a lifetime. Each one is precious and different and they lie around our necks like garlands. Friendship is the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue.

Our friends are also like the rings on a tree telling us also of our own growth over the years or as Anais Nin puts it "each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." If we were at the center, our friends would be around us like circles or like the planetary system. The circle closest to us would be, of course, our family and close relatives. The next circle would be friends we made when we were in school. Then would come the circle of friends that were our closest comrades during the undergraduate days in college. These also tend to be the ones that we retain the longest. In the next circle are friends that we often make in the work place although these tend to be for some reason fewer and less deeper than the other circles. The last circle is of friends that become so – and some of them are really close- because of proximity—they are parents of kids that our kids go to school with, or neighbors, or attended some intense course of study.

In examining these circles of friends, one thing struck me as quite curious. While each of these circles remain closely tied to us, they rarely mix with each other for some reason. Thus it would be rare that our school friends would also be friends with from our workplace. These circles do not intersect. Perhaps it is because each represents a different facet of our personality and knows only side of us or perhaps because, subconsciously, we keep these circles apart and cultivate them as a part of our own multifaceted growth.

Sometimes, however, these circles do intersect and in curious and serendipitous ways. This was brought home to me last week when I received a phone call from Bill Danforth. Bill had been a classmate during a management development program that we had attended at Harvard Business School but that was some decades ago. I was surprised since it was almost 36 years ago that we had last talked to each other. How did he remember me all of sudden? So I asked him how he was able to locate me.

“Well”, he confided, “I was on biking trip with a friend and we decided to go to Vietnam. In preparing for this trip, we read a book called “Vietnam Now” written by David Lamb. And in that book, David quotes you on numerous occasions and says that you were his “ace in the hole” whenever he needed to understand the country! From there it was easy to locate you through the power of Google!”

But what was really interesting was that David Lamb and his wife Sandy had been our neighbors in Vietnam for four years and indeed Sandy had helped edit my first book!

Ever since our marriage some 38 years ago, Ena and I had started a family custom of an “open house” on new years day where all our friends of all our circles were invited. It is a custom that both of us are inordinately proud of and we invite all our friends to turn up on the new years days in the future wherever we are.