Make it about somebody you didn’t talk to recently. Get up right now and call an old friend, or a relative. It will bring up memories and it will create new opportunities. Don’t let the dust settle on your relationships.
We live life at different speeds. Some of our friends are left behind in this race, some of them are ahead us. Calling an old friend will instantly resuscitate portions of your life which are not within your reach anymore.
It doesn’t matter if the journey put them ahead or behind you in whatever system you may use, calling them out of the blue will put them at the same table again. Telling stories like in the old times, feeling good, having fun.
It’s easier than reading this page actually, pick up the phone and call an old friend. Right now.
3 Simple Benefits Of Reconnecting With An Old Friend
It’s all about perspective, connection and improvisation. Let’s take them one at a time.
Perspective
Maybe there are more than 20 years since you last spoke. Or more. Maybe you don’t have the same likes and dislikes anymore. Maybe you’ve changed.
That’s the number one unconscious block in calling an old friend: “What if he or she won’t recognize me anymore? What if I’m going to bother him or her?”. Well, you will never know until you try. In fact, the odds are equal, before you try. You can either upset them, or not upset them.
But going beyond this will create something very important: perspective. You will be given the chance to see, through the eyes of a person you used to cherish, how your life looks right now. From the moment you lost contact, until today, you became a new person. And this old friend still keeps the same image of you from around 20 years ago. Now, you can see how much you went ahead. Or not…
Connection
Like I already said, trying to get in touch with somebody you didn’t see in such a long time can be challenging. Well, challenging is good. It will help you exercise your “connection” muscles. It will help you work out different approaches, until you find the most appropriate one for that specific context.
Every time we exercise our connection muscles, something very interesting happens. not only we get in touch with new people (or people so estranged that they may seem entirely new to us) but also with some parts of ourselves. It’s a good exercise to see how do you really interact with other persons.
Improvisation
Last, but not least, it’s about improvisation. An old friend is a strange combination: it’s a person who may remember your name and parts of your common friendship, but at the same time he or she may be unwilling to get in touch with you again. Or it may be that what you thought it was friendship was nothing more than a service you received for being so popular in high school, and that friend actually hated your guts.
Whatever the situation, getting in touch with such a person may raise some interesting problems. How can you deal with them? Well, improvise. Learn to go with the flow. Don’t stay fixed in a single approach, go ahead and see what happens. Just call that friend. You may have a good or a bad surprise, but at least you’ll have a surprise and you’ll be forced to “dance” with it.
By the way, if you smiled at the “connection and improvisation” part, thinking at tango, well, you were right. Connection and improvisation are playing such a big part in our lives and argentine tango, well taught and well practiced can be really supportive in those areas.
further reading
