On the Difference Between Meeting People and Becoming a Friend

I have met so many people in so many different ways.

 

Over the years I have tried to find a commonality in how I became acquainted with people and ultimately how I became close friends with some of them.

 

Just doing my work I met a great number of people.  But most of them have problems.  And with one or two exceptions we don’t become friends. In my job over the past 16 ½ years I have held estimating low over 21,000 hearings.  Cutting out repeat customers, that number means I have met about 75 new people every working week for the last decade and a half.   I spend a minimum of 20 minutes with each of these people.  

 

Being on a school board introduced me to many more. Being a private practice attorney for 14 years introduced me to a whole different community. Being a denizen of downtown Detroit in the late 1970s and early 1980s I met a whole bunch more.  

 

So many different people and so many different stories, but the friends I have come from places where I spent some real time.  You need time to grow a friendship. 

There was a big blocky elementary school.  There was a rectangular high school with a courtyard, man you could really run through those halls.  There was a Universe disguised as a college on a tract of frozen tundra with so many very different people. There was a dorm named after an Irish lady. There was a Jesuit law school with intense and well intense people and then there were so many other places.  It is funny the things that connect us, that keep us tied as friends.

 

I have met thousands of peoples but friends that number is a good deal smaller.