share your life with the people you love, even if it means saving up for a ticket and going without a few things for a while to make it work. there are enough long lonely days of the same old thing, and if you let enough years pass, and if you let the routine steamroll your life, you’ll wake up one day, isolated and weary, and wonder what happened to all of those friends. you’ll wonder why all you share is christmas cards, and why life feels lonely and bone-dry. we were made to be connected and close, as close as we all were for those few days in alameda, holding one another’s babies, taking turns stirring whatever’s on the stove.

so walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don’t let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. good friendships are like breakfast. you think you’re too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired. in the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don’t have time or because your house is too messy to have people over, or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. but halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you’ll realize in a flash that you’ve become breathtakingly lonely, and that the christmas cards aren’t much company. get up, make a phone call, buy a cheap ticket, open your front door.

because there really is nothing like good friends, like the sounds of laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments.

“alameda” | pages 65-66 | shauna niequist | bittersweet 
(emphasis my own)