Hello dear reader.  Thank you for indulging me as pick through the minefield of communications in the digital age.  This post has less to do with digital media than it does the human condition, but the role of social media is not irrelevant. I’ve been reflecting on relationships, finding myself, as I do, in my 50th year, and becoming more keenly aware of the transient nature of friendships, over the span of a lifetime. I was sitting in a hotel bar the other night (no, this isn’t a post about THAT sort of transient relationship) visiting with a friend I hadn’t seen in over 30 years.  She and her husband had traveled to the coast (where we grew up and I still live) to celebrate her 50th birthday.  As we sat catching up and drinking wine and giggling, her husband asked me for “dirt” on his wife from our younger years. I shared a few stories (nothing that would qualify as DIRT, however) and soon enough the conversation wound its way inevitably to deeper levels, and my friend shared with me the truths of her childhood– both good and bad.  As I drove home later, I thought about two things–one was that she thanked me for “blessing her with my presence”, and two, that I hadn’t known some really important things about her when we were kids, and that I felt privileged that she had shared her story with me. Would that conversation have happened had we not connected a few years ago on Facebook? 30 years after highschool? Or, did our social media speed up that connect, hack away the irrelevant bits of every decade and allow us to get quickly to the heart of the matter?

I was given another privilege– truly a blessing for me– that came from our connecting in person and sharing those moments on Facebook. To find out the rest of the story, please click here to visit #10 on my Coincidence page.