Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with an old friend of mine. For a few months we were running into each other almost once a week. It became a running joke how often we'd see each other but never actually spend time together. "How about coffee sometime?" one of us would suggest. Then nothing would happen.
We finally managed to pin down a day. We sat in her backyard as her daughter took a nap inside. I listened as she told me stories of her childhood, brief stints in Hawaii, San Francisco, and how she even studied in Russia as a high school student. What a remarkable life, I thought to myself.
It later dawned on me that I knew very little about my friend despite the fact we'd known each other nearly 20 years. We were never particularly close, but always got along well.
But the real reason I didn't know much about her was because I'd never really asked about her life. Our conversations were always topical in nature and neither one of us really scratched the surface to better understand what truly defined one another.
How well do we really know our friends? Ourselves? Or anyone really? The nuances and complexities of human nature make those questions difficult to answer, but it's certain that if we don't invest in the discovery of others we'll never know more than we could.
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