3,535 miles is closer than I thought

The flight is eight hours, the phone is free, the time zones are a calendar problem rather than a real one -- and the hard part isn’t any of the geography, it’s the much quieter, harder thing of deciding what stays in your life when you don’t happen to see it every day by accident, the way you did when you all lived on the same island.

I spent the first two years away from home assuming “we’ll catch up soon” counted as a plan, and it absolutely does not -- the relationships that compounded across the move instead of quietly decaying were the ones that lived on the calendar every Sunday morning, weekly, on a recurring slot nobody had to invent each time, and that single piece of friction turning into a single piece of habit is the entire difference.

The same lesson applies cleanly to people you’ve worked with -- the teammates I’ve stayed closest to over a decade aren’t the ones I “was always meaning to catch up with,” they’re the ones with whom I had a recurring slot we both protected, and ten years later the friendships still alive are almost perfectly predicted by which conversations were on the calendar and which ones lived in good intentions.

The audience is much bigger than that now, but the original reason hasn’t changed at all and I don’t want it to -- there’s something genuinely useful about writing for a specific small group of people you love rather than an abstract idea of an audience, because it keeps the voice honest and stops the whole thing turning into a performance.

Do that this week and hit reply to tell me who you picked -- I read every one, and the answers I get to this one tend to be the most honest of any I ask, because they’re always about someone the writer already knew the answer to before they read the question.