Sunday, February 20, 2011

Friends and Conversations

I was able to catch up with a ton of friends lately.  It has been really great; I miss people that I have shared my life with.  I have noticed lately that where you go and what you do really does have an impact on your conversation.  I realize that some of this is natural because the times you share in life really does dictate your conversation topics.  People tend to talk about common experiences because it helps them connect.
But more than that I  have noticed that some people just don't move past a certain point in their life.  Some of this is due to where they stopped their education, started raising a family, or started their career.  It seems to me that memories are often a product of how far we go in life.  If you experience tons of things and you keep striving to learn more and do more every day of your life then your experiences will be many and varied and as a result so will your memories.  Especially if you share those times with friends.  If you tend to clamp down and do the same thing every year and every time then your memories will still be there but they won't vary as much.  Then you have memories but it seems to me that sooner or later you just rehash the same things over and over again when you talk.
Now don't get me wrong; I have some great memories that we all love to talk about every time we get together because they are that much fun and I wouldn't want to trade those in for all the money in the world.  But at the same time being able to recall dozens of memories to me is much more fun that just one thing.

Please don't get me wrong; this isn't a reason to never do things every year.  Some passions should be done regularly and the more you do them the more memories you make.  Things like marching in drum corps every summer or playing softball are great because they are a passion and you love to do them.  But if you marched with the exact same people every year for 20 years and played the exact same shows at the exact same places then it would get a little boring.  Mixing it up is a great thing.
I love that I can keep experiencing different things every year and it seems that every summer something new comes along.  It is fun and I don't ever want to stop doing it.  And the more people I can do these new things with the more memories I can make.
Then I don't have to worry about 20 years of the same conversations about the same people doing the same things; I can talk about a wide variety wherever I go.