The Neighbors 2 + Making (Up) Friends
Friendships can be many things but they are always about embracing life
The Neighbors, Part 2: A Birthday Party!
How Friday became Wednesday
Do you remember Maria from my previous newsletter? Our old lady who became a real hero when helping another old lady out of the troubled situation she was in.
Maria is a colorful lady, having ideas and doing things that keep surprising. First of all, she is active. She is not just watching TV all day. Either she goes out shopping, or she is shopping from home through the TV shop - or she is arranging a party for her neighbors!
Today it is Wednesday and Maria called her neighbor Peter and told him that she was going to have a party this very evening. Why exactly now, he asked? Well, she felt a bit ill and since you never know what will happen it was better to have the party now than on Friday.
“But why a party?” - Peter was puzzled.
“Because, my mother would have had a birthday on Friday, had she still been alive. I want to celebrate this.”
So, this is now happening. Peter and another neighbor helped by going out shopping a few things, making a great birthday party out of it. If I know them right, they will have a cognac or two after the dinner, because nothing prevents them from doing it. Probably, they can imagine the late mother being with them there, saluting her.
I can’t help thinking at times that older people are wiser than the younger ones - they live their lives now. They do not live in a future for which they must always prepare, requiring them to hold back now. No, they live right now and enjoy life as much as they can, while they can. They are only too aware that “you never know what will happen!” - and instead of getting scared about that fact, they just take it into account when planning the day.
Are You Making (up) Friends?
Imagination is both a survival tool and a training platform
When you were a child, you may have had an imaginary friend — or just a fantasy of someone existing and being there when needed?
You played with dolls or teddy bears, or you put some kind of soul into other toys — “Now this one drives to the garage and then comes another one and they crash…” — you may have heard something like that from boys playing with their toy cars (or you remember it from yourself?)
The game of life
Toy souls are not always as elaborate as imagined friends, as they are often for one-time use, so to speak — just part of the game right now — where the friend is a lasting game.
Playing is practicing. Children learn how to do and how to talk in a variety of areas while playing, and they develop appropriate thoughts and reactions, emotions and expressions — ready to use when life becomes real for them along the way.
Some people continue this line when they grow up, spending much of their time technically alone, but with so much inspiration from the books they read, assisted by their own imagination superpower, that they develop a kind of friendship with the book characters.
Not as weird as it may sound to some, as we humans are fundamentally social, and we have the skill to play and imagine a world of social interactions that isn’t completely real but close enough — it could have been real — so we continue along a stream of thoughts that will let us live through the world of this imagined reality, this way training for when it really one day appears.
Real imagination for life
Writers do that a lot. Even if they are aware of their characters being only present in the writing, they still develop a familiarity with these characters that spawns all sorts of emotions along with the “life” developing for them in the book.
Diary/journal writers sometimes see their diary as a trusted friend and speak to it as such. Having such a friend has saved the lives of many, writing their way out of a depressed situation — to their trusted, imaginary friend, their diary.
It lets them tell all those things that cannot be told to a real friend, either because it is too intimate or secret, too strange or chocking, or because there is no real friend to tell it to.
When you are writing like this, or when imagining that a book character, whether you are writing or reading about it, is a real person, you are simply still playing — the child in you never vanishes, it is forever part of you, forever helping you to imagine situations, people, reactions, etc., forever training you for any imagined future, forever being a valve for letting out the pressure of unfamiliar or unwanted emotions.
Imagined friends have some advantages, one being simply that they are there when needed, you do not need to find them first, you just make them up. Another is that they are listening, obviously, to what you say to them, and you can trust them 100% to keep the secrets you share with them.
Real friends
Perhaps the real difference between friends from real life and the imagined ones is that the real ones have a life that is bigger than what you share with them — they are not 100% dedicated to you, and they expect you to be for them what you expect them to be for you.
A real-life friend is more like a tree in the park that you can visit and enjoy but has a different life than yours, only with moments shared now and then.
Real you
Your imagination is also real. it is part of that real, existing person that fills up an important part of the time-space continuum, that the universe wouldn’t be the same without — part of important you. It is just as valuable as the rest of you, as the rest of your life, the rest of the existence of everything.
Taking in value from your surroundings, including books, and appreciating it is a great skill to have.
You have it — your life-long ability to make friends, literally make them, whenever needed, shows how capable you are of finding and acknowledging positive input in any place, any situation.
You are real. Your imagination is real. Your imagined friends are real. Each one different from the other, and different from physical friends, who themselves are different — and available only as interferences in time and space, as moments of value.
These moments are as precious as you are able to sense them. They are in you, part of you. The friendship is your sensation of it. As great as you see it, as lasting as you remember it, as true as you want it.
My mom, who is one of the most awesome old ladies I know (yeah, she's my mom, but for real, she knows more about technology than I do. She's pretty awesome), always reminds me of this: that special dress? Wear it. The good china? Use it. We don't know what the future holds so we can only live in the now. And I really enjoyed your take on imaginary friends. I've always felt like the odd one out because I have way too vivid of an imagination, but our inner lives are sometimes just as real as real life.
Nice story, Jorgen! The human mind is an amazing thing. We can "give life" to things that are not alive in our need to feel connected. We can enjoy the lives of characters about whom we write. We can be fond of old teddy bears hanging around, or even feel we know people we see on TV or that we pass on the street every day. Most importantly, we can live in the moment with our friends and family, through good and bad, and that is what makes us special.💙Anneliese