I was in my thirties and living in London, when I observed a certain feng shui to the shifting arrangement of friends in my life.
Social dynamics that tend to peak in that decade kept interfering with the cosiness of who I spent time with. Significant couples broke up, others married, infants appeared. A close friend took a job in China. Several others headed for more affordable homes unreliable train lines away.
Sometimes I would catch myself pining. But at some point hindsight came to console me: Yes, I know you miss So and So, but look here at the bloom of this other friendship. Where one faded, a gap opened for another to come to the fore. Which called to mind something I’d read in a book about home design:
“Before you let anything into your life, you have to let something go.”
– Sarah Shurety, Feng Shui Consultant
Feng shui, or Chinese geomancy, aims to harmonize people within their surroundings – to invite sufficient wind (feng) and water (shui) for the energy to flow.
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A friend sees you for who you are. Their presence makes life feel more alive – more textured, more colored, more real. True, not all friendships carry the same weight or share the same form. And there is one type that strikes me as much undervalued – the fleeting kind. Those souls who arrive to escort you across a threshold time, who may not linger much after.
When I first moved back to Ireland after twenty years in London, I left behind a big home I shared with two others and a seven-story office crammed with a thousand colleagues. I also left behind days full of meetings. My work became silent and solitary. During that first year in my new setup, there were times when loneliness hit me like kryptonite – by the time I perceived myself sinking, I felt weak with it, barely able to phone a friend.
And then one day, a new neighbour banged on my door. Within minutes of sitting at my long table overlooking the sea, he told me he was an orphan. In his teens his mother died. He went to Spain to find his father, who, not long after, got hit by a bus. Now thirty-something, he confessed to an intense need for near-constant companionship. Later, he would introduce me to his much younger girlfriend and their demonic cat, but for now, what he was saying was this: I’m not from around here. I need to be with people. Can we go for a drink?
What I loved most about our friendship, which lasted until he realized he needed to live city center, was the content of his conversation. Eleanor Roosevelt once said: Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. My neighbour philosophized, read up on his science, considered the galaxies. Unlike most people in the vicinity, a village known for its chattering classes, he wanted nothing to get in the way of gathering ever more friends, so he rarely gossiped or judged other people. He kept the conversation expansive – ideal as I mourned my cosmopolitan life and suffered weird, small-town dealings with childhood friends I could no longer fathom.
But honestly, I sighed with relief when my neighbour moved on. His thirst for togetherness exceeded mine greatly.
Another consolation during that first year arrived with a fortuitous click one morning while sipping my coffee. I recognized myself in the situations Professor Jeremy Hunter describes where people confuse change (an event) with its elongated form – the transition. The latter demands a complex process of “inner shifts of identity, possibility, and belief.” Likening transitions to a multi-level video game, he describes the disorientation that pervades the murky middle — days, months or years, where it’s not at all obvious how (or even whether) your new circumstances will settle. Reading Hunter’s counsel that morning loosened a grief like a well-timed bear hug. And it reminds me now why the fleeting friend, that special creature, proves so instrumental.
Lately, I’ve relaxed into a sense of completion. For reasons that now mystify me, I had not foreseen that the series of changes I made seven years ago would upend my bearings so completely. But a long transition has slowly come good. As I survey the landscape, eye up the obstacles that have fallen away, a right-ordered feeling surrounds me. The feng shui of friendship has rearranged for more peace to flow through.
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