After several months chasing our own tails, we invited some friends over last night. There really wasn’t much of a plan - other than escaping from each other’s normal lives for a few hours. We filled the table up with bread, cheese, crackers, and wine and caught up properly with each other’s adventures.
I’m often mindful of the refrain “why don’t we do this more often” that inevitably follows time spent in each other’s company.
After saying goodnight in the early hours I pottered around the house - “clearing the decks” - and found myself replaying the conversations, laughter, and stories of the night.
Something I’ve written about in the past came to mind and has been rattling around my head ever since.
We’re all kind of like leaves, floating down a river together. Sometimes we become tangled together for a while, and sometimes we drift further apart. We never quite know when we night see each other again, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
We each have our own stories, unfolding as we try to make any sort of sense of where we are, or where we’re going - filled with happiness, sadness, hope, and regret - and we each play a small part in each other’s stories as we tumble along the river together.
In the past I’ve written about “sliding doors” - about the realisation we sometimes have - when we know we’re at an inflection point in our own story.
Last night was interesting because - while running this way and that, not really involved in the conversations at the table - it struck me that we’re all facing those “sliding door” moments all the time - making choices, doing our best, and wondering what tomorrow might bring.
It was an odd moment of detachment.
I wandered back into the lounge, and was immediately grounded by a question from the table - all eyes turning towards me.
“What sort of dog would you be?”
A friend volunteered the answer before I had a chance to respond:
“A labrador, obviously”
There followed an eruption of smiles and laughter, and another friend suggesting that not only can I be likened to a labrador in character, personality, and action, but they can be likened to me too - so much so that they have begun calling their young labrador retriever puppy a version of my name.
It’s not a bad legacy really, is it.