To Be Continued....

To Be Continued

John Paul Derryberry

My wife's old colleague, now friend, a former boss turned friendly sounding board, and the best friend who married my wife and I walk into a bar. Stop me if you have heard this before.  The old joke set-up works for me this week. A mad dash through Iowa City, Iowa, resulted in visits with people Anne and I used to interact with weekly, if not daily. A free gift of Iowa Hawkeye Women's basketball tickets turned into a quick family getaway, which was both awesome and a smidge stressful because traveling for 5 and 6 years is never completely smooth. 

Yet, while driving home, I pondered those excellent relationships that can pick up where you left off after a long time apart. Like when a TV show has delays and the time between season releases frustrates the viewer, but once the theme song hits, all is forgiven. It's an endearing quality humans have evolved into over the years. The notion and recognition that we must eventually part from people we hold near and dear. Life paths are different, yet when those paths seem to cross again, we interact as if the time apart was mere days, not months and years. 

For me, it's an old-fashioned notion that the world seems hell-bent on pitting everyone against each other. I found solace in reconnecting, and we were genuinely happy for each other's successes and growth in our time apart. Even if part of their stories, I thought, well, that's not what I would do for my life. The piece of that sentence is "my life." We are a little into everyone's life like I do right now. It was a refreshing reminder that as bad as some people make it out to be if more of us look past that noise, we will find a world willing to reconnect, even over differences we may have. 

It's a reminder to stay engaged in relationships, reconnect when life allows, and see what people have accomplished since we last parted. It's not perfect; nothing ever is. And honestly, perfect sounds really dull. It is authentic, which we could use more in our lives. So many life moments are edited, cropped, and filtered for social media as if that is real life.  Maybe life and relationships would be better understood through the lens of long friends reconnecting. We can pick up where we left off, and when we part again, we can say to be continued. Nothing really ever finished, to waiting to be picked back up again.