“It’s as if no time has passed” is the phrase we use to describe the closeness we feel upon reuniting with loved ones.  We pick up the threads of conversation as if we have just left the room a few minutes ago instead of the months or sometimes years that have ensued in between.

Basil and I moved to San Francisco in late 2002 and returned to the East Coast up to three times a year to visit our friends and his family. But, the first fissures appeared six years later in 2008 when, instead of the home I remembered, Boston became strange enough that I needed to carry a map to remember routes I had once known by heart.

In March we visited again and this time Boston had morphed from merely unfamiliar into a graveyard filled with the bodies of past lovers, old dreams, and the person I might have been had I chosen to stay. I stood at the Harvard Square crosswalk chilled by something that had nothing to do with the weather.

“When you’re here, do you ever feel like you might bump into your alternate self – the one who stayed?” I whispered to Basil.

Basil gave me the salty look of a pragmatic New Englander, but he patiently shook his head and squeezed my hand.

I couldn’t shake the feeling though. Boston remained haunted for the remainder of our trip.

It worsened when I realized that I had missed major developments in the lives of dear friends. I’d gotten used to missing the small stuff over years away, the daily happenings that are sacrificed in weekly calls, yet are the weft of our lives.

But at some point, I got lazy about checking in and now realized that my friends had faced serious trials without me or the need of my always-busy shoulder. One had been trying to conceive, the other’s marriage had gone to the brink of divorce before pulling back, and two had developed serious health issues. I hadn’t known, or even thought to ask.

It was shocking to realize that those relationships upon whose continental solidity I rested, were cracking. I’d been fingering the design of our friendship for years without reinforcing it, wearing the beautiful fabric thin. Through passivity and inaction, I’d let the dust settle on my face and interactions. Over time, dust holds the potential to harden into rock.

More and more I realize that our lives and our souls are reflections of each other. Relationships, and souls, both need constant tending to for weeds are always wrangling through. If we’re not careful, before we know it unbridgeable distances have arisen in between the place we stand and the place we yearn to be.

The deep time I initially spent developing my friendships allowed me to coast on that foundation for a number of years. Similarly, my illness was a forge in which I was strengthened spiritually in ways that would have taken years to otherwise attain. I’ve been coasting on that grace too, happy to ride the “high” of God without putting in the work to grow that relationship or to channel it into the service of others. I hope I can do that before I am out of time, the time that so quickly slips away day by day never to return.

At some point the path you made through hard work long ago, ends. If you’re lucky, you look down at the abruptly-ending trail beneath your feet, and ahead at the fields of tall grass and realize it’s time to shake off the gathering dust from your face and apply yourself once again.