Life is Reckless...

This is one of those nights that has the potential to change the direction of your life. That is a general statement, of course. Life is always heading in one trajectory…always. But once in awhile you meet someone – or in this case – three extraordinary new friends – who knock some sense into you while providing a cushion onto which you can fall with grace and dignity. And thereby permanently changing the course of your personal history.

Three new friends? How is it possible to make three new friends all at once? Especially three new friends worthy of writing about…since I write on this blog so rarely. And I ask myself the same thing. I have asked it of myself frequently over the past two years, and now that I’m back on US soil post-‘Swissification’, I question my American ways more than I ever thought I would. How can one make friends so quickly?  Why?  What is it that allows the same kinds of bonds to form within days here, which form over years in the lives of most Europeans?

And since, within a scant two months time, my New York bonds continue to form with the same absence of long-term investment – an impressive feat after 2.5 years of weaning myself off of my addiction to the American ‘friendship fix’ – I guess the question I have to ask myself is “when offered this gift of connection, why is it so hard for me to trust?” What has become of me that I hear professions of honest friendship with half an ear already out the door, searching for reasons why these heartfelt words are induced by anything other than a genuine desire to get to know someone? Without reason, without expectation, just based on a feeling and a gut instinct that me + them = long-term friendship?

Perhaps the answer lies in one of the things that stuck hard to my psyche after the past two and a half years of living abroad: the cliché of a belief that we as Americans are flip with our friendships. It is said that we form them fast, they are based on surface impressions, and they come and go ‘à la mode’ according to the fashion: in one day and out the next. I believe it is this adopted assumption which has made me doubtful that a hot and heavy friendship is anything but an asexual “hit and run,” leaving a gaping hole where the promise of a relationship was, and a drawer full of empty promises rather than unused condoms.

 As I sit here after a night spent with new friends, fresh from a show I’m currently performing in, I ask myself whether this belief is true, and whether or not it ultimately matters… because when it comes down to it, friends are friends, right? However you make them; whoever they are, whatever place they fill - they are friends. And their appearance at a strategic time can make or break you. This is what has always made sense to me…it’s my constant. If you need specific people, they appear in your life. Whatever place you’re in, the universe fulfills that need. You have a yearning for destructive psychopaths? Bingo – you got it. You’ve got a void that needs to be filled with insecure ado-children searching for a parent-figure? Check. But when you are open to sincere advice – the folks that are sent your way are hard to hear, hard to embrace; because what they have to say ain’t easy to absorb. But that’s why you opened yourself up to them in the first place, right? That’s why this crazy cosmos heard your wish and put these annoyingly spot-on people in your path. Which brings me back to this evening. This wonderful wine-soaked evening that inspired me to write after months of withered inspiration. I need these people. And for whatever reason, they need me. And that is enough – for this moment, for this evening, for this void, for this lifetime. Life can be ‘Reckless’ with us human beings. And sometimes that’s a very good thing…