I felt for them. I used to go home for a month at a time, maybe every 6-9 months when I was living abroad, and even then my visits home were often tiring and fully booked. My friends always make fun of me when I go home because I try to pack my schedule as tight as possible. I think I’ve scheduled 5 or 6 friends in one afternoon before – they call it doing it “Wayne-style.” It’s not that I don’t value time with my friends, its just out of necessity. With limited time at home and the need and desire to spend a lot of it with family, you just have to be efficient with your time.
Yet in doing so, you do tend to miss out on a lot of the meaningful daily interactions with friends. I met one of Trang’s good friends from her time at Uni in Australia, Thuy, and we talked about how hard it was to keep in touch with people. There was a big group of them in Australia from Hanoi, and through the years, very few of them have moved back – maybe 10% or so. Thuy said that even amongst those, she doesn’t really get to see many of them very often. When the ones living outside the country come back, they attempt to see each other if there is time, and they understand if they don’t. I guess even for me, that’s the truth – that there are real limitations with how much meaningful in-person interaction I can have with my friends.
When I do get to spend good, quality, kick-back and shoot-the-shit time with my close friends, it’s always a joy. As they’ve moved onto different stages in their lives (marriage, kid, full-blown multi-kid families) it’s gotten both harder to find those precious opportunities. Rare though they are, they can be had if you make it a priority – like spending a few nights with my friends and their daughter in the Bay Area for example – and it’s wonderful to be able to insert myself into their lives for even that brief time. The prospect of getting to do this more often and more regularly is probably a huge driver in my desire to “settle” down somewhere. Yet as it is with Trang, Son, and Thuy – when you have friends all over the world, the very act of settling down will preclude me from having these meaningful interactions with many of the friends I care most about. Thuy is very zen about it – she shrugs her shoulders and says it is what it is. Yet I don’t know if I’m ready to make that decision yet; there must be another answer to this dilemma. Like my wife, I just haven’t found it yet.
1 comments:
It's not quite the same, but I know what you mean in a way. I have the same type of feeling around the holidays when...
a) A lot of my friends living all over the States come back to the SF Bay Area for 7-10 days. For them, I'm sure they have the same feeling as you - trying to squeeze it all in (just ask Ankush!). For me, I actually feel the same way because I may have several people that we're trying to see in one weekend while everyone is in the same place (before we head to LA for the holidays).
b) We head down to LA for the holidays, it's the same thing. Wendy's family in the Valley, my parents in OC, more family from Claremont to Torrance, friends in Santa Monica to Irvine. Trying to spend quality time with the people that we care about and relax over the holidays is tough.
Even though I know it's different when you're thousands of miles away and you may only come back to the STATES every 6-9 months, I think it's very much the same feeling. The quality time that we do get is awesome - especially when we're able to just hang out, shoot the breeze, and in rare instances, soak in part of the life of someone we care about (i.e. hanging out at a friends house with their friends or roommates, walking down the street to get coffee at their neighborhood cafe, etc.).
I know you're looking to settle down and that these feelings will change somewhat when you do, but in our super-mobile society/world that we live in, I don't know if that feeling ever goes away.
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