Relationships

I've had a revelation, although I don't think that it is one that is all that mind blowing. In fact, it may very well be a maturation process that took me this many years to figure out. There will be people in your life that are meant to be there for specified periods of time (and some will be all of time.) The great question to answer, and never ending battle, is knowing which relationships are meant for each time frame.

Perhaps the best way to answer that question is based on the evolution of that relationship. For example, relationships that result because of the neighborhood one moves into seem to remain as such as long as people remain in that neighborhood. When one leaves that neighborhood, as much as you would like to believe that the relationship will remain strong, distance diminishes it. Thus, the strongest relationships that are neighborhood based are destined to be challenging at best when one leaves it. I would hypothesize that if the move out of the neighborhood was one mile or one thousand, they are likely to diminish equally for no other reason.

Relationships that begin early in ones life, no matter what they are (child to parent, friend to friend, sibling to sibling) have to mutually evolve or they are destined to failure. For example, if a parent treats one of their children like they are a perpetual adolescent, the child may not appreciate being treated in that manner in their adult years. Both sides need to evolve, or the relationship will be miserable all the time, or it will simply cease. If one or both sides choose not to let the relationship evolve, I would say that the relationship has reached the end of its useful life.

My belief is that relationships continue over time as long as both parties respect each other and recognize when it is time to change the approach to it. However, instead of letting the relationship go with animosity or grief, it seems to me that the sage approach is to look at the relationship for what is gave to you at that particular moment in time and glean the positives from it. If there were negatives, use those negatives as a learning experience for what you can do in the future to be better at your current or next relationship.