This weekend has served to remind me about the value of friendship, and of having a life. It’s easy to let work consume your life - in my case so much that I approached this weekend with a creeping dread that the time we were investing in social activities were taking away from time I might otherwise have spent working.
On Saturday morning, shortly before leaving for my inlaws, I wrote on twitter “Saturday morning, and the beginning of a slightly mad non-weekend. Freelance work, dinner with friends, and dinner with more friends to come”. Notice the italics.
A part of me was dreading a weekend filled with commitments - even if some of them were of my own doing. This is of course an entirely selfish point of view, perhaps engineered by a couple of stressful weeks at work, and freelance projects waking up. So many excuses. I have worked a little, but it hasn’t outwardly effected an otherwise memorable weekend; the kind we should make more effort to bring about.
Yesterday evening we visited some school friends of W, and their young family. While the children happily played together in the way all small children seem particularly skilled at, we “grown ups” caught up on each other’s lives, ate, drank, and basically spent time together. It occurred to me on the journey home that it’s not complicated - all we did was spent time together, and we all enjoyed doing so. We didn’t need movies, or anywhere to visit - just each other.
Today we invited friends over that live fairly locally - a short train ride with their baby - and again, it struck me afterwards how easy it all was. Before their arrival this morning W and I went a bit mad tidying around the place (that’s what happens when you are both busy all week, and then out all weekend), but once our guests arrived, we kicked back and relaxed. Again - good food, good conversation, and each other. It’s not complicated.
This weekend has also reminded me that in order to have anything worth writing about, it has to have happened to you. Life is the most interesting thing any of us has to pontificate about, and unless we get out there and experience some of it, we have little of any interest to share.
The question now is what part of life I might throw myself in the direction of.