Friendships: Warm and Cold

The job of maintaining quality friendships gets harder as life gets busier. Here’s what I’m doing to meet the challenge.

Over the years I've met so many people that have meant so much to me. I continue to meet inspiring new people every year.  

I've written on friendship before. My poem Old Friend! (a favourite from Blades) is about the reconnection of a friendship gone cold.

Friend, don't forget

as we cast our jigs and reels

Don't tell me what you've heard

Tell me what you feel

I believe a natural human habit is to organize our people, places, and things into their boxes. It's the most convenient way to pretend to make sense of the world. How friendships unfold as a man transcends his box - becoming "unboxed" - or stepping "outside of his box" indicate the quality of friendship at play. Some friendships cannot withstand such transitions. They die as individuals grow. Others stand the test of time and evolution. Those are the good ones.   

So while there remain only two types of friends (old and new), I have also realized there are two types of friendships: warm and cold.

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The warmest connections I currently have are with people already on my regular agenda: immediate family, work colleagues, fellow parents who I see at Rosemary's stuff, and hockey players.  

Now, I happen to have friends in each of these groups, and I praise God for every morsel of their existence. They are, without doubt, my hottest friendships right now. The people I see talk to and laugh with often.

Then there are my cold connections. Those important people I haven’t seen or heard from in some time.

I resolve:

1) To pay attention to my warm connections.

2) To acknowledge and honour my cold connections. 

On resolution # 1 (to pay attention to my warm connections): Anyone I see regularly (warm connections) have an advantage of becoming a close warm connection due to organic proximity. I resolve to be curious. To be an active listener during our interactions. I resolve to reject the motions and the going through of them as is my default behavioral pattern when behaviour is left unchecked.    

Why? Maybe by improving the quality of my social connections I will improve the quality of my social health and thereby improve the quality of my life. It's an experiment in process. My goal is to see what happens*.  

On resolution # 2 (to acknowledge and honour my cold connections): It's a cold connection. But my gawwwd, what a connection! I acknowledge a cold connection is not a dead connection. It's the difference between the basement freezer and the alley dumpster. What I put in the freezer is not urgent - not needed today. But not garbage, either. Every appliance costs energy. I gladly pay the bill**.

*I'll be sharing all my goals for 2026 on this blog here shortly. Get your popcorn ready.

**Have a better analogy for cold friendships than my basement freezer one? Drop yours in the comments.     

I've learned my blog is a multi-purpose tool. A swiss army knife. Perhaps the newest use may be to reheat the link from myself to my cold mates. Where once we stood together in solidarity, in meaning and purpose, on fire. Today, as meaningful as ever, yet chilled.

2026 is going to be an awesome year for us.

Until next time, my friend.