Friday Notes #82 — Friendship Between Generations
Cross-generations friendship is something relatively new to me.
I recently spent some quality time with one of my colleagues at a coffee shop on a sunny Sunday morning. In the last couple of years, I’ve been working on different projects with her on and off. Over time, we became friends, and our discussion subjects became more and more non-work related. She’s probably at least 20 years younger than me. On my way to meet her at the coffee shop, I was thinking about friendships in general but more specifically about the fact that most of my friends are my age. She is not. And I like it. Why, you might wonder? Well, I'm more and more appreciative of this friendship spanning generations. As I wrote in my previous Friday notes article, I have a friend who happens to be of the prior generation; at 72, he’s my oldest friend. Being in her twenties, my colleague is probably the youngest friend in my friend's circle.
Cross-generation friendship is helping me get a peek at the young generation that follows me, besides my children. It’s exciting and helpful to learn about their language twists, new trendy things, know what’s out, how they see the world, what they expect for the future, etc. This generation is the one who will take care of me and what we leave behind us. So having conversations between generations is a way of learning from each other. When I express my numerous thoughts on so many different mundane subjects, she knows about me, but also she’s getting a peek at why, maybe, the world is what it is, for the good and bad sides.
I don’t know where this friendship will go in the future, how long it will last, or how long life will keep us on the same path. How could I know? We don’t know what someone will bring into our life. The mystery is what makes the moments on the same path precious. I can’t wait to see where this will lead us.
Oh, one last thing, you heard that song “Human” by Rag’n’Bone Man? Well, I like it a lot, and I should probably sing it out loud because, yeah, I’m only human, and that is why I couldn’t help myself and decided to install iOS 16 on my iPhone and iPadOS 16 on my iPad in their beta form, breaking my intention of waiting ((as I wrote in “The Joy of Waiting”) for as long as possible before doing so.
