Friendship Is Built In The Present, But We Can Deepen Its Roots By Sharing Stories From Our Pasts

Dalton here, Amy’s one month shy of turning 25 year old son (feel free to mark that in your calendars so you’ll remember to send birthday wishes my way 🙂 ) filling in for my Mom tonight so she can have a little alone time with my Dad…and frankly, I prefer to not know what they’re doing in their alone time…

Tonight I got together with an old friend, and we were talking about some fun projects we want to collaborate on. It led to a discussion on past work we’d each done and the experiences we each brought to the table.  I began pulling up content I had created when I was twelve years old. We watched and laughed at how ridiculously bad my early work had been. I mean I had created it over a decade ago, and like I said I was twelve, but it was so funny to watch my early attempts at being witty and humorous.  (My very first episode ever, created at the age of 12 on Tips For Surviving Life Part 1:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlqrkKGvwpE&t=18s   and part 2:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6LrSS1hRUQ&t=3s  ).

Next my buddy pulled up examples of projects he had created when he was back in middle school— unbeknownst to me— which sent me to the floor laughing because what he had created in middle school was almost parallel to the work I had created.

Here we were growing up in separate states unaware of the other’s existence yet, creating hilariously creative content of the same youthful quality that we can laugh at together a decade later. What struck me was that here we were, two friends who met while serving an LDS mission in Mississippi in our early 20’s and who stayed best friends since, just now discovering how alike we were all those years before we ever met. As we laughed together I told my friend that I’m positive we would’ve been buddies growing up now knowing just how similar we truly were.

New memories and good times can be made by sharing memories from the deep past with a friend. As adults, there’s a tendency to create connections on current, shared experience and interests, which is a completely fine way to live life, however, what I came away with tonight is that there’s also a good chance that the people you naturally relate to and get along with currently might have also shared very similar interests from their youth that, if shared with one another, could make for some excellent laughs that will deepen your bond of friendship.

As C.S. Lewis said, “Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”

~Dalton R. Anderson

PS. I think its about time I get to have my own Avatar when I fill in for Mom on her blog, don’t y’all?

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