drop-everything friends
on what we lose and why we accept the hard.
i am in the flurry of all the last-minute errands and tasks—and yesterday’s 8 a.m. task was to bring my car in to be professionally cleaned. “detailed,” they call it.
so i load up my bag with plenty to do for a couple hours, only to find out it’s a four hour ordeal. you know, so the shampooed seats aren’t wet anymore. little details i know nothing about.
so what do you do? i will tell you what i did: i texted my three drop-everything friends. you know, the friends that i would drop everything for, to come rescue them or meet them for an emergency conversation. the ones that can interrupt my day and i will be so glad that they did. those friends. i asked them to drop everything for me.
“i’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” elizabeth responded instantly. she lives across town from the car detailing shop, so she really did drop everything. immediately.
and i realized: sure, i will make new friends in spain. i’m not worried about making new friends. but. how long will it be before i have a single drop-everything friend? i’m leaving behind multiple drop-everything friends, in my current city alone. they are, of course, irreplaceable. but will i make new drop-everything friends? how many years will that take?
moving to spain will be so good, for all three of us in my little family. but it will also come with its hard parts. (and i’m definitely a “hard isn’t automatically bad” kinda person. but this could be a lot of hard.) spain is a better fit, for each of us for our own list of reasons, but it is still not easy to pick up your life and move to another country, another culture, another language, another people.
so i got a lil sad about the losses of moving, not least of which will be my drop-everything friends. i was perseverating about the hard parts of remaking a better life for yourself. and at the end of the perseverating i got a little sign. a literal sign:
“comfort is a slow death.”
and right them, i was realigned back to the reality that we’re choosing a better life over a comfortable life. and that is good, and right, and worth all the hard. we’re not interested in a slow death.
and so—we go towards life.
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