The normal, everyday tragedy of losing friends.

The normal, everyday tragedy of losing friends.

Let’s say you’re carrying one of your many solid gold bars through the park in your backpack (because this sounds like you, right?). But when you get to your destination, you unzip your bag and find the gold slipped out through a hole in the bottom.

What do you do?

There’s no question what you do, right?

You scramble. You go back. You hustle to look around everywhere. You hope to God you stumble across it and if you do, you pick it up.

Now, let’s say the gold bar isn’t a gold bar at all (admit it, you keep all yours in a wall-safe behind a picture frame anyways), but a friend. And let’s say your friend wasn’t stuffed into your backpack (thank God) as much as they were packed into your day…placed neatly into your routines…for days or months or even years.

But then, as you were living, you went somewhere new, or you wandered away for a while…and eventually, you looked in your day-to-day routines and the old friend was no where to be found.

Shrug. Shrug. This is how life happens to us. This is the normal, everyday tragedy of losing friends.

Wha…? We wouldn’t apply that logic if the item we lost was a thing of value rather than a person of value. Tell it to me straight. You’d turn around to look for a twenty-dollar bill that fell out of your coat in the parking lot, right?

Well, isn’t a friend worth at least twenty bucks?

When you lose something (or someone) you value, there’s a universal, logical response. Go back and try to pick it up.

I’m amazed, as I’ve been writing more about friendship, how many people tell me–regretfully–about the distance that’s sprung up between them and former buddies. I can relate. It happens to the best of us.

But please don’t judge yourself for whatever community you’ve lost along the way.

We all are forced to stumble through life’s transitions before we are fully equipped to face them, before we fully know what our priorities should be or before we know how to juggle everything of value without dropping anything.

Go back, retrace your paths and try to claim what’s yours.

And if you can’t, live today’s friendships in honor of the ones that have faded. Make how you stick to the people you care about today a tribute to what you learned from previous losses.

I offered this challenge once before. But I plan to keep bringing it up because I suspect all of us have unclaimed valuables out there. And a lot of times we forget that…

Everyday tragedies like losing friends can be avoided.