“A friend is one who overlooks your broken fence and admires the flowers in your garden.” – Unknown
I love that analogy, I think it gives a good picture of love in friendships. When you love someone, you can look past the aspects of that person that may otherwise rub you the wrong way or that you find annoying. Let’s keep that concept but put it in a more literal context. Imagine you are on a walk in a run-down neighborhood and you walk past many houses with broken fences and houses that are in disrepair, paying them no attention, despite beautiful gardens in the yards. Now imagine that you have a friend who lives in this neighborhood, so you are looking for her house. When you find it, you want to send her a picture to tell her you walked by her house. You find something pretty in the garden, like a flower or a full fruit tree, to take a picture of instead of taking a picture of the whole scene where the focus may be on the house and fence that are in major need of some TLC.
It takes a lot more effort to look past the broken down parts on the outside than to just take things at face value and focus on the broken fences in people. So often we can see someone do something that we do not like or say something that we do not agree with and just write that person off as someone we will never be friends with. Even in new friendships that are yet to have conflict or disagreements, we may observe something and decide that person is not worth getting to know anymore without giving ourselves a chance to look past that broken fence and see the beautiful garden beyond.
Yes, you get to choose your friends. Yes, you can decide not to be friends with someone after learning more about who that person is. You also get to decide to stay friends with someone after learning more about who that person is. Friendship is messy and complicated. If Elizabeth, Katelyn, and I focused on each other’s broken fences instead of the flowers beyond, we would not be friends right now. When you decide to focus on the beautiful garden, you gain so much more than when you focus on the broken fence. You gain another person who is in your corner and whose corner you get to be in. Some friendships only last a season and we can be thankful for that season. Other friendships are for life and those ones are so special. You probably also have friends that you think will be for life but end up leaving or going in a different direction in life. Those are tough to say goodbye to.
There is a saying that friends are the family that you choose. I really like that concept; we do not get to choose the family that we are born into, but we do get to choose who we surround ourselves with in life. Whether they are across the country (or the world) or right next door, friends are such a great blessing.
Friendships also take a lot of time and effort, just like those gardens that we get to see when we look past the broken fences on the outside. Think about the work that goes into a garden. The first thing you do, after preparing the soil, is deciding what to plant and planting the seeds. When we first meet someone, we start planting seeds in getting to know a little bit about each other. Next comes watering. Seeds need water to start growing. In friendships, we water the seeds by spending time together and maybe starting to talk about deeper topics than we started with. This may also be the time you switch from communicating through social media to texting. Or, maybe if you started out texting, this is the time you may connect on social media. Once the seeds have been watered, the plants start to grow and you finally get to see some fruit of your effort. Of course you don’t stop watering when the plant starts growing, though; you keep watering and the consistent watering keeps the plant alive. And in friendships, you still keep getting together and hanging out after you have really connected and gotten to know each other better. In some cases, your new friend turns into your best friend, who you always have to call or text anytime you have any type of interaction with your crush or your arch nemesis.
When it comes to friends, my main piece of unsolicited advice is to choose your friends wisely. In the past few years, I have made the mistake multiple times of jumping into friendships too quickly and deeply before realizing that I was trusting someone I should have never trusted with certain things going on in my life. Thankfully, I have learned to recognize the lack of trustworthiness quicker, but I have still trusted too quickly and regretted sharing certain things. This is not to say to never trust anyone, just to be cautious if you tend to trust people easily.
On the other hand, if you are hesitant to trust people at first, remember that you have to give people a chance to prove that they can be trusted. It is a tricky balance learning how to not rush into trusting someone too quickly while also not keeping someone at an arm’s length for too long that a friendship is unable to bloom.
Abbi