Conversations Women Keep Circling Back To
Friendship, the Company of Women, and the Someday List I'm Done Postponing
I have a group of friends who are always game to go for a hike. Deep in the forest, the conversations meander like the trail: laughter around a bend, quiet through the uphills, backtracking to finish a story. In the slower pace of a hike, I notice that there are certain topics that keep resurfacing.
This edition of the Seasoned Voices collaboration emerged from a similar conversation. Our small group of women bloggers were chatting about books (another very common topic), and Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed came up. We all fell in love with the idea of Sugar answering questions that women like us would ask, just like questions that come up when I’m hiking with friends.
We explored the topic and identified the similar threads that showed up in each of our own lives: over coffee, on trails, at kitchen tables, and over emails. As a group, we chose three themes to write about in our own way to share with you.
Friendship.
In the Company of Women.
Someday.
Here's where my reflections landed. I’d love to hear your own experiences in the comments below.
FRIENDSHIP
What do my closest friendships now reveal about what I actually value?
“Three little dickie birds”
We stopped on a bench to take off our boots, change our socks, and stretch our toes. We sat facing the warmth of the sun, still revelling in the beauty of northern Spain on our fourteenth day on the Camino. A woman walking past slowed just long enough to grin and say in a thick Aussie accent that we were so cute and looked like "three little dickie birds." She snapped our photo and called out Buen Camino before continuing down the trail. We never learned her name, but our new nickname has stuck.
The two other dickie birds are friends from my hometown. I've known one of them for about twelve years, and I met the other just over a year before we all boarded an airplane for Spain. The twelve-year friend is enthusiastic in a way that fills a room and, just as generously, fills a silence with positivity. She's first to laugh and first to ask the honest question, always curious to learn something on purpose. The other is deeply empathetic, wise, sure of herself without needing anyone to agree with her, and about as far from judgmental as a person gets. Plus, her laugh is infectious and a little startling given how grounded she is otherwise, proof she’s as much fun as she is wise. Different women, wildly different lengths of friendship history, and somehow the exact right two people to walk 350 kilometres beside.
As a kid, I moved every two or three years, so I never had any "old friends." I assumed adulthood would fix that. That I'd settle into one town, one job, and a core group of women I'd know from kids in diapers to whatever came next. Mine never evolved that way. I've lived in my current town for thirty years, but my career shifted more than once, my kids grew up, and the sports and school communities that used to come with ready-made friends kept turning over. My circle has never stopped moving, and I often thought I must be missing something.
I don't think that anymore.
I have a spidey sense, fine-tuned by years of new beginnings, that tells me quickly who I want to let into my life. I'm friendly, yet guarded, and suspect that many people decide that I'm hard to get to know. But once I let someone in, I'm all in. On the Camino, twenty-nine days of walking and travelling together did the work that decades of coffee dates usually take.
True confession: I'm also not particularly good at the maintenance side of friendship, like staying in touch across years or distances. I learned that (bad) habit early. When you know you're the one who's going to move, you write letters to your “last best friend” and let the rest go. Pre-internet, that meant real letters, and not many of them. Those too fizzled out. The habit of letting friendships slide is hard to break.
What I am good at, it turns out, is starting fresh and building a friendship based on exactly who I am right now. That's the real answer to what I actually value: not that I collect friends quickly, or hold onto them forever, but that I stay present to whoever is with me.
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN
What happens in a room full of women that can't happen anywhere else?
Hugging the stone wall, twelve women snake single file through the souks of Marrakech, alert to motorbikes zooming through streets barely wide enough for people, let alone motorized vehicles. We were about to spend two weeks together hiking through the Atlas Mountains and then crossing Morocco by bus, stepping fully into a culture very different from our own.
Most of us were loosely connected going in. Some were strangers, soon to be friends. I remember considering that twelve women together for two weeks with no easy exit was a gamble. It could have gone either way. Two weeks in close quarters with almost anyone surfaces challenging dynamics that often take things sideways.
It didn't.
By the third day we were swapping stories and coaxing each other out of our comfort zones. By the end of two weeks, that group of semi-strangers had talked more honestly, and shared more openly, than some groups I've known for years.
One evening, after walking nineteen mind-blowing kilometres, we sat on the mud roof of our homestay, scattered across the colourful cushions. Some of us stretching, some writing, some drawing, some likely dozing. The conversation meandered, as it does, until someone said something deep with emotion, and nobody rushed in to fill the silence with platitudes. Then someone else did the same. We were bone-tired, and somehow that made it easier to just listen instead of fix. We were simply there for one another.
I don't think a room full of women automatically results in this. In fact, I've been in rooms full of women that felt competitive or clique-y at work, at parties, even in friendships. What I think happened on this trip was that we were far enough from home that the usual roles we carry of mother, boss, wife, whatever else, simply didn't show up in Morocco. Plus, the whole experience was foreign enough (the language, the terrain, the food) that we needed each other before we even discovered how much we liked each other.
I think that what’s going on in a room full of women, especially travelling, is that support and connection happen before they are earned, and result in a bond tighter than you’d expect. I don't know if that's a female thing or simply a human thing that happens to work especially well with women. What I do know is that I am choosing the version with just women more and more often, and every time, I’m glad I did.
SOMEDAY
What's my someday that I no longer want to postpone?
At the top of the Quiraing, on the Isle of Skye, I hiked along the cliffside which looks out over a vast horizon of jagged green rocks, sea, and sky that is almost unearthly. The trail my husband and I were following seemed very singular compared to the many possibilities and directions available across the landscape. For much of my adult life, my someday list felt like that vista with countless options in so many directions, all of them visible, but I had no idea how to get there.
I've never been able to look away from other options. I prefer being a bit unconventional and am always scanning and appraising new directions to follow. What do I want to do next? Where will I go next? For a long time, someday was met with excuses: "once the kids are older, once we retire, once things settle down, once we can afford it." I know I'm not alone in building up a great list of somedays.
Entering my fifties changed how I looked at many things, someday being one of them. Not because I feel old (I don't), but because I pay attention and take bigger risks to do what I want to do now. The friendship with the two other dickie birds on the Camino, the connections our travel group found in the Atlas Mountains, occurred because I said yes before I felt ready, before it was convenient, before I'd planned it perfectly.
I've been planning another women-only trip to the Azores for next year. I hope to walk coastlines and old volcanic craters together for a couple of weeks. I could tell you it's the destination I'm excited about, and it partly is. But it's also about taking hold of an opportunity to make someday happen.
So instead of waiting for a life with more time, money, or confidence, I'm looking at options, choosing my path and booking the trip.
These are the conversations that circle: what relationships look like now, what happens when we connect with just women, and what we're finally done postponing. Seasoned Voices set out to sit with these three topics, each of us answering in our own words. We’ve all landed somewhere slightly different, which was what we were hoping for, and makes for interesting reading.
I encourage you to visit Helen, Linda, Joan, and Pearl’s blogs. Please comment and continue the conversation like we are hiking or sharing a coffee. Pick the one that hits closest to home.
What do my closest friendships now reveal about what I actually value?
What happens in a room full of women that can't happen anywhere else?
What's my someday that I no longer want to postpone?
