One of the most trying things about adulthood is how intentional you have to be about every little thing to avoid things you care about dissolving into mist.

Take friendship, for instance. When you’re young everyone is just kinda knocking around and bumping along and you find friends. You accidentally end up in the same places and find sacred time to share joys, hopes, and fears with each other.

As an adult in our society if you luck into meeting someone you might want to be friends with, you better pursue that person like a lover or you’ll never make a meaningful connection with them. The thing is, this missed connection is a tragedy. Really all we’re meant for is to connect with others and share ourselves with each other. That’s the whole ballgame. But our culture is aggressively arrayed against spending the time required to deeply encounter another person.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way but I worry about coming across as a cloying, needy burden to people around me. I set a meeting for coffee w/ someone and they show up 15 minutes late and I’m like, what’s the point? I want you for an hour or more! I want time to spin out around us and flower into one hundred possibilities for us knowing each other.

All I want from life is to hear people’s stories, their desires, their hopes and fears. I want to hear about what someone hates, the people they can’t stand, the thing their parents do that gives them grief. But we let these relationships slip through our fingers and collectively we’ve decided it’s no big deal. It’s just one of those things. It’s part of being 30, you know, we’re busy? We skim across the surface of our lives together. We’re off to the next meeting, or the next errand. We’re “just in the middle of something,” we’ll “get right back to you,” but we never do, and we barely remember that we missed out on a dozen such connections throughout our day.

Too busy to be human.