Moving, Friendships and Our Evolution

I have noticed that throughout my life, friends change as I change, and that seems to me to be just a natural part of our evolution.

The fact that so many of us have moved so many times in our lifetime contributes to this.

My own spiritual evolution got a jump start simply from the fact that many years ago when the company I was working for moved me to a different part of the country where I had no friends, no relatives, nothing but my job. So as I looked around for things to do, I was completely free to try new things, and that is how I got introduced to new people and new ideas.

Yes, I missed my old friends, but earlier in my life my main entertainments were going to bars, going to baseball games, playing basketball, playing guitar and partying a lot. I was no longer involved with the church I was raised in, but I had not taken up anything new or different, either.

I am sure that moving opened up new worlds for me. I am sure that the people I used to go barhopping and partying with and would have thought that I lost my marbles if I would have suggested going to a psychic fair, a sweat, a firewalk, personal growth workshop, an alternative healer, a drumming circle or a full moon ritual.

So although I missed my old friends, new ones came into my life and my experience of the world kept expanding.

We have lived through changes that are so profound that sometimes we do not even recognize them.

My mother, for example, has lived in the same house all her life, has had some of the same friends since high school, has gone to the same church all her life. She has added new friends over the years, but she could not understand when me or my siblings moved, usually for work related reasons. She thought we all ought to live the rest of our lives in or near the city where we were born.

In earlier generations, people spent most of their lives within 20 miles of where they were born. So the whole idea of moving and changing friends was a radical idea for the first generation to move from home.

New friends with whom I have shared part of my spiritual evolution were invaluable, and it is inconceivable to me that they would have been the same individuals at all times and in all situations.