Boiling Water

Sometimes you lose track of time. The bulk of emails remain in the inbox, the phone messages keep coming in. There never seems to be a break. When it does come you are oft exhausted, yearning to be doing nothing.

People hide their vulnerabilities behind smiles, with short WhatsApp messages and emojis. All too often, it is the fear of being judged that keeps them from sharing. Drifting starts to happen. Not the worst case for many, but still it could lead from one level of shying away to distancing. Then slowly you start to lose them.

What is your definition of friendship? What is your expectation towards your friends?

Over the last 3-4 years, I’ve probably made a hundred new friends (No, I didn’t actually count but its a good guess). Traveling from place to place, then building a life in Taiwan, and lastly just being open to meeting more people through various events.

You may have made quite a few friends yourself. Out of the many people you meet, some may come to be important people in your life, some may just drift in and out. Who stays as important and who’s gonna be a drifter depends solely on you. You see, people share experiences, they share memories and time together - regardless of how long or short that time may be. These moments don’t disappear and they don’t change once they have happened. You allow yourself to think otherwise, you allow yourself to feel as though things have changed. Then the change really happens because you stop seeing the person as a friend.

Imagine you’re boiling pots of water. You put them on the stove. Each pot of water will require a different amount of time depending on the size of the pot and the intensity of the flame. The time taken to bring the water up to temperature and begin boiling is the “Pre” stage. This is the beginning of friendships. It’s when you first got to know a person. It’s when you’re deciding if this person can be a friend. Sometimes you hit it off almost immediately and your friendship has taken off quickly! Sometimes you meet up many times before actually developing any sort of actual friendship. In some cases you just can’t get anything going, and you will not be able to wait long enough to bring the water to a boil. There’s nothing wrong with that - we meet many people in our lives and we can’t just spend all the time focused on one or two individuals. It’s like having many new pots of water being handed to you. In order to work on the new pots being handed to you, you have to remove some from the stove. Logically speaking you’re going to remove those that are taking too long and not showing progress. Everyone’s going to have different configurations for their stove and similarly people have different capacity to taking on the possibility of new friendships. I’m inclined to believe that I’ve got a pretty huge stove with multiple gas burners - allowing me to readily try new friendships and to open up the possibility of developing more friendships.

If the “Pre” stage is the initial meeting and familiarization period. Then once the water has started to boil, your friendship has gone into the “Boiling” stage. After that happens some people keep the pot on the stove for some time to let it continue “Boiling”, and those are the moments that you keep giving attention and building the friendship. Some people take the pot off the stove, availing the gas burner for new pots of water as mentioned earlier. That may sound cruel, but the reality is you have to make a decision, do you keep the burner occupied with this pot, or set the pot aside to take on new pots? If you keep it on the stove, then yes you will always have this friendship “Boiling” and it will be great! The flip side is you will only have those friendships and never find out if there are more exciting friendships to be made. Also, a lot of people don’t realize that, once a pot of water has come to a boil, the water doesn’t change - it has already been boiled. Taking it off the stove cannot change it back to un-boiled water (for the lack of a better word). The only thing you’re doing is setting it aside. You could put it back on the stove anytime later on, and since the water has already been brought to a boil it will take less time to heat up again! That becomes the “Re-heat” stage, where you put in effort to maintain older friendships.

Some people make plenty of new friends in life, they bring the pot to a boil and then take them off the stove - leaving room to make new friends. Then from time to time, you put some of the older pots back on the stove to re-heat them. Some pots you leave on the stove for long periods of time, and only take them off for short spurts. These are perhaps your closest proximity friends during a certain phase of life, because you share daily life or activities together. Some pots you leave off the stove, but bring them back to re-heat occasionally. They may be friendships you have from long ago, but because everyone is busy you’ve not had the same amount of time to catch up. Yet the value of each pot of water isn’t determined by how often you put it back on the stove to “Re-heat”, or how long you keep the pot in the “Boiling” stage but how precious each pot is to you! There are some pots that are precious to you, and even though you don’t bring it back to “Re-heat” that often, you still see it as precious because of the time or the memories that you shared during the “Boiling”.

Every friendship goes through the “Pre”, “Boiling” and “Re-heat” phases. There are some friendships that as time goes by you’ll end up forgetting to “Re-heat”. Maybe you have too many pots to focus on. Maybe you just don’t have enough time. Yet if you do decide to “Re-heat” them the friendship is still there, the shared memories and experiences during the “Boiling” cannot disappear. It may just take a little more effort to bring it back up to temperature!

When friendships go cold, it isn’t the just the other persons’ fault. You have a responsibility too. When you refuse to put it back on the stove, that is when you have failed. People need time, people have different responsibilities and life stages. Circumstances change, people change but friendships don’t. The water is still boiled water. The only change is when and how often you put each pot of water back on the stove.

At the end of the day, you decide which pots of water are important to you. You decide how long you want to keep it “Boiling” before taking it off the stove. You decide when and how often you would like to “Re-heat” it. But there’s one more thing you can do, and that is to develop your own capacity to building more friendships, even if it means increasing the gas burners on your stove by just one. This way you can embrace more and learn more, and grow more.

Lastly, if you have some pots of water that you haven’t placed on the stove for a long time, it’s never too late to “Re-heat”!